Jan van Kessel the Elder

Her youngest son, Prince Andrej of Yugoslavia (1929–1990), London;

Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 10 December 1980, lot 76, for £115,000, when acquired by Jean Schuybroek.

Lord Methuen, review of P. Mitchell, European Flower Painters, London 1973, The Connoisseur, February 1974, p. 13, reproduced fig. 1;

J. de Maere and M. Wabbes, Illustrated Dictionary of 17th Century Flemish Painters, Brussels 1994, vol. 2, reproduced p. 679;

M.-L. Hairs, Les Peintres flamands de fleurs au XVIIe siècle, Tournai 1998, p. 274, no. 261;

A. van der Hoeven, De bloemstillevens van Jan I van Kessel (1626–1679), unpublished diss., Groningen 2002, no. 17;

K. Ertz, with C. Nitze-Ertz, Die Maler Jan van Kessel: Jan van Kessel der Ältere 1626–1679, Jan van Kessel der Jūngere 1654–1708, Jan van Kessel der ‘Andere’ ca. 1620–ca. 1661. Kritische Kataloge der Gemälde, Lingen 2012, p. 313, no. 527, reproduced.

Jan van Kessel, who is thought to have worked for some years in the studio of his uncle Jan Brueghel the Younger, painted a wide variety of different kinds of still lifes in several disparate styles. Although inevitably influenced by the Jan Brueghel tradition in many of these, some (but by no means all) of his elegant still lifes of flowers in vases, of which this is an excellent example, probably owe more to the influence of Daniel Seghers, as Peter Mitchell observed. In contrast to the Brueghel tradition, in his simpler flower pieces Van Kessel concentrates on a small number of well-differentiated flowers – here tulips, roses, a poppy, an iris and a hydrangia with a few smaller blooms – set against a dark background from which they stand out with sharp clarity. 

Few of Van Kessel's flower-pieces are dated. The earliest is from 1649. By comparison with the series of nine or more flower still lifes on copper almost certainly painted for export to Spain and dated 1652, the Schuybroek one must be later, perhaps from the late 1650s or 1660s, but before the looser, broader style he adopted in works dated in the 1670s. 

Note on Provenance

Queen Maria of Yugoslavia (and Maria of Romania) was the daughter of Prince Ferdinand of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen and Princess Marie of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. She was born in Gotha in 1900. A noted beauty in her youth, she worked as a nurse in the First Word War before marrying King Alexander I, second King of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in Belgrade in 1922. Following her husband's assassination in Marseille in 1934, she settled on a farm in England. Her youngest son, to whom she presumably gave or bequeathed this painting, was largely brought up in England where he anglicised his name to Andrew and read mathematics at Cambridge before becoming an insurance broker. In 1956 he married his third cousin Princess Christina Margarethe of Hesse (1933–2011) in Kronberg im Taunus. Her uncle is the Duke of Edinburgh, who was godfather to two of their children (only one survives). Divorced in 1962, he remarried in 1963. His second wife was his second cousin, Princess Kira Melita of Keiningen (1930–2005): they had three children. They divorced in 1972 and he remarried in Palm Springs, California.