Osias Beert the Elder Antwerp (?) circa 1580 (?) - 1624

Anonymous sale, Paris, Piasa, December 8, 1999, lot 28;
With Richard Green, London, there purchased by the present owner.

Beert was one of the pioneers of still life painting in Antwerp where he was registered as a pupil in the painter’s guild in 1596 and enrolled as a master in 1602.  Among the still lifes known by Beert today, which do not outnumber fifty, few more than a dozen are signed or monogrammed, and not one is dated.  However, as many as four were painted on copper plates dated by the maker to 1607, 1608 and 1609, providing some indication of the year in which they might have been painted.  Only one of the paintings on copper is a flower picture, making it very difficult to date his flower pieces with a great degree of precision.  According to Fred Meijer, Beert’s earlier handling appears to have been smoother and less painterly than in his later work.  In his opinion, the present painting is probably somewhat later than, but not much removed from the only known flower piece by him on copper plate (Galerie De Jonckhere, Paris, 1984, cat. no. 19, signed and the plate dated 1609), and should consequently probably be dated to the first half of the 1610s.

 While Beert’s individual bouquets must surely have been inspired by the work of Jan Brueghel the Elder, Beert himself can be credited with the inspiration to assemble several bouquets into one still-life composition.  Thus far, only a very few examples of such compositions are known.  Only one other more complex composition is known, containing two vases and two baskets of flowers (see Flowers and Nature, catalogue of the exhibition, Osaka/Tokyo, Sydney, 1990, cat. no. 30, reproduced), while others consist of combinations of a single basket and a bouquet in a vase.  The present work is Beert’s single known composition with three vases and, until the recent re-emergence of this painting, was known only through a copy, perhaps from the artist’s studio (see La nature morte et son inspiration, catalogue of the exhibition, W. Weil Gallery, Paris 1960, cat. no. 5, incorrectly as an autograph work by Beert and still included as such by M. L. Hairs in Les peintres flamandes de fleurs au XVIIe siècle, ed. 1985, p. 342).

Though Beert’s still lifes do not appear to be heavily imbued with symbolism, his contemporaries may well have read some of it in them.  The general symbolism of flowers as metaphors for the brevity of life was common knowledge and so, probably, was the butterfly as a symbol of the resurrected soul.  The variety of flowers may well have been regarded as a celebration of God’s diversified Creation, but most of all, to contemporary viewers then, as now, such bouquets are primarily an unfailing delight for the eye.

We are grateful to Fred Meijer, Curator, Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, The Hague, for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.