Vase of Flowers in a Window

About this work

Artist

Ambrosius Bosschaert (1573–1621)

Year

c. 1618

Medium

Oil on panel

Original size

64 × 46 cm

Collection

Mauritshuis, The Hague

Movement

Dutch Golden Age

Thirty kinds of flowers, tulips, roses, columbine, iris, carnations and a half-hidden fritillary, stand in a glass vase decorated with masks inside a stone window, and behind them the window opens onto a sweeping river landscape under a bright sky. A tiny beetle sits on the white rose in the middle and dewdrops bead the sill. Bosschaert painted each flower from separate studies made through the year, so the bouquet shows blooms that never flower together, and he was the only painter of his generation to set a bouquet before an open landscape, as if to say the flowers had come from across the world. Most of them were foreign and rare; the tulip was still a novelty in Holland. He signed with a monogram of an A enclosing a B, in homage to Dürer. Painted around 1618, the panel is one of the treasures of the Mauritshuis in The Hague.

This exhibition-poster edition shows the whole work beneath original typography set in-house. The original is in the public domain.