Vase of Flowers

This is a cabinet picture, and the category matters. In the 17th century collectors began keeping small paintings in a private room, taken out and held close, looked at from a foot away rather than across a hall. A panel like this one, 41 centimetres by 33, was made for that kind of attention. The glass vase is done with a few touches of white and nothing more, and the flowers are worked with great care, variety by variety. Then there are the leaves. Several of them have been eaten through by worms, and that damage is deliberate, a note about time passing that sits under the cold blues and greens the painter chose here. The Prado gives the panel no single year, only a span somewhere between 1600 and 1625, and it is kept in store rather than on the walls.