Date: 21-07-2002
Owning Institution: Private collection
Publication:     Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”  
Subject:   17th Century    

The eighteenth-century master Jan van Huysum, the most swaggeringly inventive of the Dutch fruit and flower painters, is fairly well represented in British public collections. The National Gallery, for example, owns a couple of good examples of his work. But Van Huysum’s two most brilliant and perfectly preserved paintings remain in private hands. Neither has been publicly exhibited for almost fifty years – until now. Their owner, who lives in London, recently placed both on loan to the Dulwich Picture Gallery for the summer. Designed as a pair, one shows mostly fruit, the other flowers. The latter is this week’s suitably blooming choice of picture.

The principal source of information about Van Huysum is a short biography written by his contemporary Johan van Gool, who describes him as a secretive and even rather paranoid individual. According to Van Gool, he suffered from severe hypochondria and an apparently baseless lifelong conviction that his wife was cuckolding him. He seems to have regarded the outside world with equal suspicion, reputedly refusing to take on pupils (with the exception of a young woman called Margareta Haverman, the daughter of a friend, whom he instantly dismissed once she started showing some talent) for fear that they would steal his “secrets”.

Van Huysum’s gifts were such that he need not have worried about the competition. No other painter of his time understood as well as he how to delineate, in all their varieties of form and hue, the fashionable and extremely costly blooms – hyacinths, fritillaries, peonies, roses, tulips, chyrsanthemums – cultivated so assiduously by the well-to-do and their diligent gardeners. None could paint those small, trompe l’oeil details, the still-life painter’s flaunts of his own ingenuity, with anything approaching his deceptive ease. He was the undisputed master of the poised fly, the creeping caterpillar, the leaf-borne drop of dew – globular, perfectly clear, filled with the suspense of the moment, quivering with surface tension. None shared his deep understanding of the play of light and shade and the reflection of colour. In painting the picture shown here, observing how the shadowed side of a glistening leaf takes on some of the intense colour of an adjacent peony, Van Huysum has applied just a small but necessary touch of red glaze to his blue-green foliage.

He was an innovator as well as a virtuoso. Still life painting languished in Holland during the early eighteenth century, which coincided with the end of the so-called “Golden Age” of Dutch art. Collectors were bored by paintings of dead fish or hunks of meat, the earthiness of which clashed with the increasingly ornate character of the rooms in which they lived. Those types of picture all but died out, while even flower paintings done in the old Dutch style – muted bouquets in dark indoor settings, musty with the time-honoured pieties of the vanitas tradition – seemed terminally out of fashion. It was Van Huysum’s achievement to revitalise his chosen genre for an openly hedonistic age, unshadowed by darker spiritual concerns.

He did so by altering almost every aspect of the tradition which he had inherited. Instead of arranging his blooms in a vase on a sideboard in a darkened room, he places them outdoors, in full sunshine, in an urn decorated with garland-bearing putti. The setting is some corner of pan-European patrician parkland in which two common eighteenth-century ideals – that of a return to nature, and a return to the classical past – are easily blended. Behind the vase to the right stands a statue of the goddess Flora. On the other side all is trees and foliage, a bower of restful green.

Van Huysum’s most spectacular innovation was his approach to composition. Whereas earlier Dutch painters had almost invariably aimed at a compact, well rounded and logically convincing bunch of flowers, he aspired to the creation of a kind of floral incendiary device, blossoms flaring out in all directions. In purely formal terms, viewed through half-closed eyes, the dynamic structure of his bouquet recalls that of some great Baroque altarpiece, the Virgin borne heavenwards while angels scatter like confetti in all directions. But there is a strong affinity too between the sweeping arabesques and decorative swirls into which Van Huysum teases stalks, flowers and foliage, and the principles of Rococo interior decoration (all the clearer because the picture still occupies its original Rococo frame, with its rhyming curlicues and flourishes of giltwood and plaster). Van Huysum’s swooning, blowsy, almost lasciviously abandoned blooms also have an unexpected but unmistakeable sex appeal. They are floral equivalents to the languorous, obliging goddesses of Rococo mythological painting.

So well adapted were his paintings to the taste of his times that Van Huysum’s pictures sold, during his own lifetime and for some half century afterwards, for unprecedented sums. By the end of the eighteenth century his works far exceeded even those of Rembrandt in cost. The eventful life of the picture shown here is itself testament to the covetability of Van Huysum’s mature works. Bought, with its pendant, for a small fortune by the Landgraf Friedrich II of Hesse-Cassel, subsequently appropriated by Napoleon, it was later passed between scions of two great European banking families, the Barings and Rothschilds, before coming into the possession of its present owners. It is well worth making the trip to Dulwich to see Van Huysum’s prize blooms before they fade, once more, from public view.