Balthasar van der Ast

Dr Hans Wetzlar, Amsterdam, by 1952;

His posthumous sale, Amsterdam, Sotheby’s, 9 June 1977, lot 97, when acquired by Jean Schuybroek.

L.J. Bol, ‘Een Middelburgse Brueghel-groep III’, in Oud Holland, vol. LXX, 1955, pp. 143 and 153, reproduced p. 147, pl. 8;

L.J. Bol, The Bosschaert Dynasty, Leigh-on-Sea 1960, p. 71, cat. no. 13, reproduced pl. 36.

The nephew and pupil of Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder, Balthasar van der Ast was a more long-lived and prolific painter. He developed and expanded the Bosschaertian style in Utrecht, bringing it to a broader audience of the newly wealthy in The Netherlands.

In this work, probably dating from the early 1630s, Van der Ast has arranged a mixed bouquet of tulips, hyacinth, iris and other flowers, surmounted by a double white narcissus, in a dark-ribbed vase of a type he used in a few other paintings. The prominent shell to the right resting on the ledge is a Devil's Claw (Ptocera lambis L), found in the seas around Indonesia, where ships of the Dutch East-India Company were already trading and establishing trading posts around the island of Java by Van der Ast's day. A similar shell occurs in Van der Ast's shell-piece in the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen in Rotterdam.¹ Van der Ast made a watercolour drawing of this or a very similar shell in an album in the Lugt Collection in Paris, which he monogrammed and inscribed: Cleijen Geelghepleckte Crab.²

¹ Bol 1960, pp. 79–80, no. 78, reproduced pl. 44a.

² Paris, Fondation Custodia, collection Frits Lugt, inv. no. 6534 (1-71); S. Ayooghi, S.Böhmer and T. Trümper, Die Stilleben des Balthasar van der Ast (1593/94–1657), exh. cat., Petersberg 2016, pp. 209–16, cat. no. 40k, reproduced p. 216.