Jan van Huysum, 'Glass Vase with Flowers, with a Poppy and a Finch Nest', about 1720-21

A profusion of still-life images of flowers flooded the Dutch Republic in the 1600s. Jan van Huysum’s paintings marked the end of the century with a flourish. Unlike many other artists, he adapted his style to the huge change in taste that took place throughout Europe.

By the early 1700s, the arrival of the decorative, lighthearted rococo style put heavier still-life paintings out of fashion. White walls or wood panelling were ideal for displaying realistic pictures of dead birds, ripe cheeses, leathery books, glittering silver and unnerving skulls. But the new pale-coloured or daintily patterned walls needed something less weighty and demanding. Lush arrangements of blooms against a dark background disappeared. Virtually the whole still-life genre went into abeyance for almost 200 years.

Van Huysum painted Glass Vase with Flowers just after he had begun to adopt light, summery backgrounds and more detailed patterns and designs for his bouquets. In this picture he returned to the dense, black backgrounds of ten years before. It is just as detailed, but painted with a new vitality. Flies hide on leaves and there are drops of clear water, but the image is almost playful in its delicacy. Light dances through the bouquet, enlivening the sombre colours of blue-grey irises, purple aquilegia and grey-green leaves.

The two full-blown roses make us aware of petals as patterns, especially the centre of the white rose with its curled rosette. The finch’s nest is a frail concoction of feathers and straw around a cluster of tiny eggs. The stillness of the striking white butterfly contrasts with the confusion of subdued colour and shapes in the shadow of the roses. Stalks and tendrils wind their way through the flowers, from the rosebuds drooping over the table edge, past the misty grey of the iris up to the frills of the scarlet poppy, its blazing colour softened by the warm brown of the butterfly at the top.

Van Huysum had been one of the most successful painters of flowers for many years, but this change of fashion to rococo was now in demand. Among his clients were the Duc d’Orleans in France, Sir Robert Walpole in England and the King of Prussia. His first biographer, Jan van Gool, wrote that the highest recorded valuation of a Rembrandt in the seventeenth century was 30,000 stuivers, for The Woman taken in Adultery. Van Huysum sold two paintings for at least 110,000 stuivers each. Van Gool also dubbed van Huysum ‘The Phoenix of Painters’ because of his ability to adapt to the new style when, for all its glory, Dutch realism was dying.