Still Life with a Vase of Flowers

This 1620 flower still life on oak panel by Ambrosius Bosschaert is held in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm. The year 1620 is very late in Bosschaert's career — he died in 1621 — making this one of the final works he is known to have completed. Despite the brevity of his career, Bosschaert established the conventions of Dutch flower painting so thoroughly that his formula — symmetrical bouquet in a glass or ceramic vase, stone ledge, insects, and mixed-season blooms — defined the genre for decades. The Nationalmuseum's acquisition of this late work gives Stockholm one of the few examples of Bosschaert's oeuvre outside the major Dutch and British collections. Panel support in 1620 was already beginning to give way to canvas as the preferred support for still life, but Bosschaert remained loyal to panel throughout his career, and the smooth surface of these late works shows his technique at its most refined.

Late Bosschaert on panel achieves extraordinary fineness of detail: petals are individually rendered with thin, stable paint layers that have not shifted or cracked over four centuries. His palette in the final years is slightly warmer than earlier work, with more emphasis on the yellow-orange range of tulips and marigolds. The overall composition retains the strict bilateral symmetry that characterises all his flower pieces, even as individual flowers are placed with the asymmetries of natural growth.