Vase of Flowers

This flower piece is 181 centimetres tall and only 70 wide, painted on canvas. That shape is a clue about what it was for. Tall narrow panels of flowers were made to fit architecture, over a door or between windows, and this one had a companion of the same format. In 1794 the pair was recorded in the Palacio Real Nuevo in Madrid, in the red room next to the apartments of the infantas, listed under number 920. Near the middle of the bouquet sits a sunflower. It had reached Europe from the Americas in the previous century, by way of Spain, and in the first decades of the 1600s it was still a garden rarity in the north, grown for show. Around it the Prado's record names fritillaries, peonies, tulips, irises, anemones, orange blossom. The museum dates the canvas no more precisely than the first quarter of the 17th century, and it is currently in store rather than on show.