Vase of Flowers in a Niche

Schloss Weissenstein at Pommersfelden, in Franconia, was built in the 1710s for Lothar Franz von Schönborn, prince-bishop of Bamberg and archbishop of Mainz, and his family filled it with paintings. When this flower piece came up for sale in Paris in 1867, the auction catalogue gave it a pedigree from that house, saying it appeared in the Schönborn picture catalogues of 1719 and 1746. The Museum of Fine Arts doubts it. The only one of those catalogues ever published, the 1719 inventory, lists no Van Huysum at all, and a note in the museum's own record dates the panel to about 1732 to 1736, too late for it to have been there. The heading of the same record says about 1715, so the date itself is still open. What can be traced is a letter of 1836 in which a visitor to Pommersfelden mentions seeing Van Huysums there. After Paris the picture went to Prince Paul Demidoff in Florence, and at his sale in the San Donato palace in 1880 it was bought by Stanton Blake of Boston, whose will brought it to the museum in 1889. Among the flowers is a striped tulip, one of the rare hybrid varieties collectors prized, and the signature sits on the marble slab at the lower right.