Vase of Flowers

In 1759 Ferdinand the Sixth died and his stepmother, Isabel de Farnesio, governed Spain until Charles the Third could arrive from Naples. She used the interval to settle in Madrid and buy the Buenavista palace, and with the building came 46 Flemish paintings to furnish it: 29 given to David Teniers the Younger, 17 to Jan Brueghel the Elder. Two of the Brueghels were flower pieces, and this is one of them. Daffodils, tulips, pinks and roses stand in a vase of blown glass, with small insects among the petals. On the table, to the left of the vase, sits a frog; to the right lies a bezoar stone, a hard mass taken from an animal's stomach that was believed to cure, and above all to work against poison of any kind. The Prado dates the panel to the first quarter of the 17th century.