Vase of Flowers

This is a flower piece made to fill a wall panel. The canvas is 181 centimetres high and 70 wide, tall and narrow enough to take the pier between two doors, and Brueghel normally worked small, on copper or on a wooden panel. The museum's index of what grows in it runs to about three dozen plants. Spring snowflake, hyacinth, jonquil, snake's head fritillary and narcissus flower in March and April. Peony, madonna lily, carnation and marigold come in June and July. All of them stand in the one vase, with a stag beetle, a damselfly, a cockchafer and a seven-spot ladybird among the stems. The Prado dates it no more closely than the first quarter of the 17th century. In 1794 it hung in the antechamber of the infantas at the new Royal Palace in Madrid.