(Antwerp 1601–1678)
A basket with spring flowers on a stone table,
oil on panel, laid down on panel, 53.6 x 74 cm, framed

We are grateful to Klaus Ertz for confirming the attribution of the present painting. A written certificate is available (February 2018).

Ertz writes about the state of the present painting: ‘This painting has survived in good condition. The colours give a brilliant and shining impression and have been applied thickly in the impasto technique so that the raised paint layers can be felt with one’s fingertips. […] In this flower still life, Jan Brueghel the Younger, who was always in his famous father’s shadow, shows that he cannot deny his model and probably also does not wish to do so. In the meantime we know that the father encouraged his son to collaborate on their flower paintings even before his journey to Italy. He would not have done so if the latter’s quality as a painter had not come up to his own […].’ Ertz mentions a Flower Basket from around 1620 now in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art as an example for the collaboration between father and son.

To corroborate the attribution to Jan Brueghel II, Ertz cites several compositions closely related to the present painting:

1) Still life with a flower basket and a goblet (Budapest, Szépmüvészeti Museum, 1630s);
2) Still life with a flower basket and a goblet (Paris Galerie d’Art Saint Honoré, 1630s);
3) Flower basket (Amsterdam, Christie’s, 11 May 1994, 1630s)

Ertz again: ‘In the later paintings from the 1630s and, above all, from the 1640s, his focus was on the two-dimensional surface, the powerful colour accents placed next to one another, and their rug-like effect rather than on the three-dimensionality of the floral arrangement. In the painting to be assessed, he presents himself as an independent artist capable of combining old ideas with new form and thus of creating something new.’