The tulip season is officially at its height from 9 April to 9 May, so this week’s picture is a beautiful early seventeenth-century depiction of a tulip by the Dutch painter, draughtsman and miniaturist Jacques de Gheyn II. Executed in pencil and watercolour on vellum, the work is signed and dated 1603 and thus coincides with the beginnings of commercial European tulip cultivation, which began in Holland, in the town of Leiden.


This watercolour is one of twenty-two studies of flowers and animals by Jacques de Gheyn II, which were bound into an album and sold by the artist to the Emperor Rudolph II of Prague in 1604. Rudolph, one of whose ambitions was to create an encyclopedic natural history museum, valued these works principally as minute records of the exotic wonders of nature – tulips, at the time, being among the most exotic and unfamiliar of flowers. Long regarded as masterpieces of northern naturalistic art, the works in the de Gheyn album eventually passed into the collection of the great twentieth-century Dutch collector Frits Lugt. The album may still be seen in its entirety at the Frits Lugt Collection, which is housed in the Institut Neerlandais in the Hotel Turgot in Paris. Anyone wishing to view the collection will need to make a prior appointment. This is well worth doing. The telephone number (from England) is 0033 1 47057519.


The known facts about Jacques de Gheyn II are few and far between. The principal source of information about him is a brief biography by his contemporary Carel van Mander, who relates that he was the son of a painter and stained-glass designer (Jacques de Gheyn I) and that he studied engraving under the master Hendrik Goltzius in Haarlem. “He then worked alone for a time, and, although he had...

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