10 things about Agnes Block

Agnes Block is often described as a woman of many talents. The renowned Dutch poet Joost van den Vondel was impressed by her many talents and wrote several poems about her. He portrayed her as a woman who filled her days with studying, reading, drawing, watercolor painting, and sculpting.

After her first husband’s death in 1670, Agnes Block bought the Vijverhof estate along the Vecht, where she spent most of the year with her second husband, textile merchant Sijbrand de Flines. Like many wealthy Amsterdam Mennonites, she had a country house, but at Vijverhof her love of plants truly flourished. In this title print, she sits by a pond with an open book, Vijverhof forming the green backdrop of her life’s work.

Wandering through Vijverhof must have been impressive. In a poem, her grandnephew Gualtherus Blok described gardens full of hedges, orchards, ponds, kitchen gardens, flower beds, greenhouses, and aviaries. Many plants came from far beyond the Vecht region, reaching her estate through European and colonial trade networks. For Block, cultivating was also collecting: Vijverhof became a miniature world where plants from distant lands came together.

Flowers fade, birds fly away, and insects live briefly. To preserve her collection, Agnes Block commissioned artists to document her plants and animals. Herman Saftleven, for example, created over 100 watercolors for her, including this blooming prickly pear cactus, a rare sight in the Netherlands. Other artists, including Alida Withoos, Maria Sibylla Merian and her daughter Johanna Herolt-Graff, Maria Moninckx, and Johannes Bronkhorst, also worked at Vijverhof.

Agnes Block collected all her flower and animal portraits in carefully compiled albums. Their importance is clear from her 1694 will, which stipulated that whoever inherited Vijverhof must also keep her “art of little birds, plants, and herbs, executed in watercolor” as part of the estate. Her wishes were not fulfilled: the albums were sold and the drawings dispersed.

Only one complete flower book survives today, now in the collection of the Rijksmuseum.

The flower book is more than a collection of beautiful drawings. It likely served as a visual record of Block’s garden, showing plants that grew there or ones she hoped to add. Some pages are left blank for future additions, and two small notes show crossed-out flower names, probably because they had been included. Many plants are depicted in different stages, from seed and young shoot to bud and full bloom. So the book shows not only what grew in her garden, but also how plants developed over time.

In some of her tulip portraits, Block noted not only the grower’s name but also the bulb’s weight and the price she paid. Weight was measured in asen (100 asen = less than five grams) and price in guilders. This highlights how valuable certain tulips were, like this “Anvers” tulip, worth 510 guilders. Although the famous tulip mania had passed, rare tulips remained status symbols, bringing one to bloom showed taste, knowledge, connections, and financial means.

Not everything in the flower book was created especially for Block. On several pages, cut-out floral prints were pasted in, likely taken from publications by the French botanical artist Nicolas Robert. Some fragments were combined into new compositions, such as the bouquet on folio 167. The album’s title page is also based on a Robert engraving, which Block hand-colored and adapted. By including his work, she consciously placed herself within the international world of botanical knowledge.

The flower book contains one remarkable exception: a pasted-in drawing from 1637 of a butterfly, whose real wings were pressed directly onto the paper. The result is an almost lifelike imprint, showing every delicate vein and subtle color variation. It is the only insect depiction in the album and a rare experiment, highlighting Block’s determination to be recognized as a serious observer of nature.

Around 1680, Agnes Block became the first person in the Netherlands to successfully grow a ripe pineapple at Vijverhof. This remarkable feat was commemorated with a silver medal: the obverse shows her portrait with the name “Flora Batava,” and the reverse depicts the goddess Flora, Vijverhof, and a pineapple, with the motto “Art and Labour succeed where nature falls short.” The pineapple became her personal emblem, symbolizing her botanical knowledge, ambition, and authority.