- 31
Osias Beert the Elder Antwerp (?) circa 1580 (?) - 1624
Description
- Osias Beert the Elder
- still life of tulips and an apothecary's rose in a stoneware vase, irises and lilies in a glass vase, together with roses, lilies, anemones, pansies, larkspur, borage and love-in-a-mist in a wicker basket and a chinese lacquer basket, all upon a table-top with cabbage white and red admiral butterflies and a dragonfly
- oil on oak panel
Provenance
Exhibited
Literature
F.G. Meijer, A Dictionary of Dutch and Flemish Still-life painters working in oils 1525-1725, Leyden 2003, p. 32.
Catalogue Note
This is by far the largest and most elaborate flower-piece known from Beert's hand, and must also rank among the grandest still lifes of its type produced anywhere in the early seventeenth century. Although little is known of Beert's life, he remains one of the most important and influential artists of the earliest generation of still-life painters in Flanders. He was apprenticed to the Antwerp painter Andries van Baseroy in 1596, and six years later in 1602 was formally received as Master into the Guild of Saint Luke. His wife's nephew, the still-life painter Frans Ykens, was the best known of his recorded pupils, and Beert's recorded collaboration with Rubens himself described below suggests that he enjoyed some considerable repute in his own lifetime.
Beert's extant oeuvre consists entirely of fruit and flower still lifes. Only about a dozen of these paintings are signed or monogrammed and none are dated, although two are on copper plates with the date mark of 1609. Although a secure chronology for his work is thus extremely difficult to establish, the present panel is likely to be a mature work, painted in the last seven or eight years of Beert's life. It is the largest and finest of a group of related flower pieces, and certainly the most complex. The earliest of these is probably the Still life with three vases of flowers formerly with Richard Green, London, and sold New York, Sotheby's, 18 May 2006, lot 99, which Fred G. Meijer dates to around 1610 or shortly thereafter. The Chinese lacquer basket seen at the back of the present composition may well have belonged to Beert himself, for it recurs in the other flower still lifes in this group. These include the Still life with basket and vase of flowers formerly in the Hoffmann-Hess collection in Basle,1 the Basket of flowers formerly in the Van Diemen collection, Berlin,2 and the Basket of flowers with a dragonfly now in a private collection.3
The late Ingvar Bergstrom first suggested a date for the present work of circa 1622 on the basis of photographs, and more recently Fred G. Meijer of the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie in The Hague has tentatively argued for a dating between 1615 and the early 1620s. He compares it to the flowers added by Beert to the painting of Pausias and Glycera by Rubens in the John & Mable Ringling Museum, Sarasota, which is generally dated to around 1612-15.4 He feels that Beert's individual flower-pieces tend to date from later in his career, where they formed subjects in their own right rather than simply forming part of larger laden-table compositions.
1. M.-L. Hairs, The Flemish Flower painters of the 17th Century, Brussels 1985, p. 337, reproduced fig. 106.
2. Anonymous sale, Vienna, Dorotheum, 7 October 1998, lot 60 (withdrawn from sale). Although elsewhere stated to be signed, no signature is recorded in the sale catalogue.
3. Reproduced in S. Segal, Oude Kunst en Antikbeurs, Delft, 5-13 October 1991, plate 1. Dr. Segal dates this example to around 1615.
4. See M. Merling, Ringling. The Art Museum, Sarasota 2002, p. 105, reproduced.