Still Life with Flowers

c. 1660 - 1690

Object data

oil on canvas

support: height 63.5 cm × width 45.8 cm

Inscriptions

signature, with ligated monogram, top right: .AVB f·

Technical notes

Support The plain-weave canvas has been wax-resin lined. All tacking edges have been preserved, though slightly trimmed at the top. Cusping is visible on all sides.
Preparatory layers The single, light brown ground extends over the tacking edges. It consists of coarse white, some bright red, a few small brown and orange pigment particles with a small addition of fine black pigment particles.
Underdrawing No underdrawing could be detected with the naked eye or infrared photography.
Paint layers The paint extends over the tacking edges. The background was executed first, with reserves for the flowers. These were underpainted in a flat tone, approximating the colours that were to be finally achieved, and the contours were adjusted in some places with black. The flowers were then worked up from dark to light, continuing over the background in several places. In this stage the paint was applied wet in wet, resulting in very subtle transitions in colour. Glacis paints were used in a final stage, sometimes extending over the background. The smooth paint was applied very thinly, leaving no visible brushstrokes. Slight impasto can only be discerned in the highlights of the metal chain and watch on the table.
Zeph Benders, Ige Verslype, 2022

Scientific examination and reports

infrared photography: Z. Benders, RMA, 6 November 2008
paint samples: Z. Benders, RMA, nos. SK-A-355/1-2, 6 November 2008
technical report: Z. Benders, RMA, 6 November 2008
infrared photography: I. Verslype, RMA, 12 March 2019

Condition

Fair. White particles are visible throughout the dark paint of the background, probably due to the formation of lead soaps. The gentians at top right and bottom left are greyish and appear to have lost their original blue colour due to pigment degradation. The two yellow roses in the centre lack detail and look rather flat, and have presumably also lost their initial colour. The glacis paints have faded, and can barely be distinguished with the naked eye but fluoresce clearly under UV light.

Conservation

W.A. Hopman, 1875: canvas lined; attached to new stretcher
M. Albrecht, 2019: complete restoration

Provenance

…; ? sale, Christina Maria Drekman (†), Amsterdam (C.F. Roos et al.), 14 April 1857, no. 74, as signed ‘AVP’ (‘Een bouquet Bloemen geplaatst in eene kristallen vaas, staande op een marmeren plint. h. 64, br. 46 d [64 x 46 cm] D.’), fl. 27, to Duchatel;¹…; sale, Maurits Cornelis van Hall (1768-1858, Amsterdam), Amsterdam (C.F. Roos et al.), 27 April 1858, no. 309*, as R. Ruijsch (‘Een glazen Flesch, in welke geplaatst zijn eene menigte zeer fraaije Bloemen; dun en delicaat gepenseeld’), fl. 65, to Nicolaas Pieneman, for the museum; on loan to the Rijksmuseum Muiderslot, Muiden, since 1998

Object number: SK-A-355

The artist

Abraham van Beyeren (The Hague c. 1620/21 - Overschie 1690)

The first reference to Abraham van Beyeren, the son of a glazier from The Hague, dates from 1636, when he is mentioned as the 16-year-old pupil of Tymen Cracht, an otherwise unknown artist. He married Emmerentia Sterck, a citizen of The Hague, in Leiden in 1639, and registered as a master painter in his home town a year later. The first indications of his chronic financial woes are from 1646/47, when some of his furniture was sold at auction and a few dozen of his pictures came under the hammer at the annual sale of the Guild of St Luke in order to settle his debts. In 1647, after the death of his first wife, Van Beyeren married Anna van den Queborn, daughter of the printmaker and painter Crispijn van den Queborn and granddaughter of the court artist Daniel van den Queborn. He thus became related to the still-life painter Pieter de Putter, who was married to an aunt of Anna. Van Beyeren was one of the founders of Confrerie Pictura, the artists’ society established in The Hague in 1656. He moved to Delft, probably to escape his many creditors, and registered with the city’s Guild of St Luke in 1657. In 1663 he returned to The Hague and remained there until about 1668, when another auction of his works was held to pay off his debts. From 1669 to 1674 he was active in Amsterdam, in 1674 in Alkmaar, and from 1675 to 1677 in Gouda. During the last 13 years of his life he lived in Overschie, now a suburb of Rotterdam. His financial situation remained precarious, and in 1689 he auctioned another 54 paintings. He probably died in early 1690. His probate inventory was drawn up on 15 March 1690.

Abraham van Beyeren probably began his career as a marine painter. His monochrome depictions of small sailing boats in stormy weather betray the influence of Jan van Goyen and the Leiden School. They were probably made from the late 1630s until some time in the 1640s. His earliest signed and dated work in this genre is from 1641.² At some stage Van Beyeren turned his hand to still lifes. His earliest one bearing the year of execution is from 1651,³ but a painting of mussels is documented in 1645. A 1649 votive tablet in the Groote Kerk of Maassluis includes figures, seascapes and fish, but it is not known whether Van Beyeren was solely responsible for it.⁴ His last dated picture is a banquet piece of 1667.⁵ No clear stylistic development can be discerned in Van Beyeren’s oeuvre, as it difficult to establish a chronology for his works and he did not adhere to one specific type of still life but switched intermittently between fish, game, flower and banquet pieces. Nothing at all is known about his output during the 70s and 80s, when he must still have been highly productive.

Erlend de Groot, 2022

References
F.D.O. Obreen, Archief voor Nederlandsche kunstgeschiedenis: Verzameling van meerendeels onuitgegeven berichten en mededeelingen betreffende Nederlandsche schilders, plaatsnijders, beeldhouwers, bouwmeesters, juweliers, goud- en zilverdrijvers [enz.], I, Rotterdam 1877-78, p. 45; ibid., II, 1879-80, p. 27; De Stuers in F.D.O. Obreen, Archief voor Nederlandsche kunstgeschiedenis: Verzameling van meerendeels onuitgegeven berichten en mededeelingen betreffende Nederlandsche schilders, plaatsnijders, beeldhouwers, bouwmeesters, juweliers, goud- en zilverdrijvers [enz.], II, Rotterdam 1879-80, p. 84; Bredius in ibid., III, 1880-81, p. 258; Bredius in ibid., IV, 1881-82, pp. 60, 135, 151; Moes in U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, III, Leipzig 1909, p. 570; A. Bredius, Künstler-Inventare, IV, The Hague 1917, pp. 1165-72; I. Blok, ‘Abraham van Beyeren’, Onze Kunst 17 (1918), pp. 113-21, 159-65; G.C. Helbers, ‘Abraham van Beyeren Mr. Schilder tot Overschie’, Oud Holland 45 (1928), pp. 27-28; A.P.A. Vorenkamp, Bijdrage tot de geschiedenis van het Hollandsch stilleven in de zeventiende eeuw, diss. Leiden University 1933, p. 24; H.E. Van Gelder, W.C. Heda, A. van Beyeren, W. Kalf, Amsterdam 1941; G.C. Helbers, ‘Abraham van Beyeren te Gouda’, Oud Holland 62 (1947), p. 164; J.M. Montias, Artists and Artisans in Delft: A Socio-Economic Study of the Seventeenth Century, Princeton 1982, p. 346; S.A. Sullivan, ‘Abraham van Beijerens Visserij-bord in de Groote Kerk, Maassluis’, Oud Holland 101 (1987), pp. 115-25; Erbentraut in Saur Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, X, Munich/Leipzig 1995, pp. 346-48; Meijer in E. Buijsen et al., Haagse schilders in de Gouden Eeuw: Het Hoogsteder Lexicon van alle schilders werkzaam in Den Haag 1600-1700, exh. cat. The Hague (Haags Historisch Museum) 1998-99, pp. 96-103, 268; A. Chong and W.T. Kloek (eds.), Still-Life Paintings from the Netherlands 1550-1720, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum)/Cleveland (The Cleveland Museum of Art) 1999-2000, p. 290; A. van der Willigen and F.G. Meijer, A Dictionary of Dutch and Flemish Still-Life Painters Working in Oils, 1525-1725, Leiden 2003, pp. 33-34

Entry

This still life is probably the work that was in the 1857 Drekman sale, where the monogram was read as ‘AVP’.⁶ At the Van Hall auction a year later it was attributed to Rachel Ruysch, one of the most popular flower painters of the Golden Age.⁷ That the monogram was recognized as Abraham van Beyeren’s some decades later is in keeping with his fortuna critica around that time.⁸ His name had sunk into oblivion in the eighteenth century, but he was ranked among the foremost still-life artists by the end of the following one.

The admiration for Van Beyeren’s work continued to grow in the twentieth century. His painted bouquets were considered among the most beautiful of the Golden Age.⁹ Warner, one of the first to write about the genre, was mesmerized by the artist’s Flower Still Life in the Mauritshuis: ‘When looking at a picture of this quality it conveys a sense of reality which is uncanny’.¹⁰ In his opinion the Rijksmuseum’s very similar canvas ‘just misses the extraordinary quality of the other […] but the freedom of brush-work is more easily seen’.¹¹ Van Beyeren’s bouquets were admired for their ‘very soft touch’ by Bergström in 1956, and in 1994 Segal still believed them to show ‘great artistry’.¹² More recently, according to Taylor, however, the artist failed to create a convincing illusion of space, the compositions were incoherent and his brushwork sloppy.¹³ It is hard, though, to judge the original appearance of the present painting, for it has suffered a striking loss of colour.¹⁴ The blues, in particular, have become so dull that some of the flowers can no longer be made out; in the foreground, the morning glories can still be identified, but what appear to be gentians on the lower left and upper right have become almost unrecognizable.

Van Beyeren painted only a few of such flower pieces. They are thought to be from the first half of the 1660s, but apart from the fact that they were obviously inspired by De Heem’s output from a decade earlier we have no further clue as to their dating.¹⁵ A still life with a rummer and a rose by or after Van Beyeren was raffled at Jan de Bondt’s lottery in Wijk bij Duurstede in 1649, but it is unlikely that the artist depicted entire bouquets at such an early stage.¹⁶ Van Beyeren’s choice of flowers was not based on their popularity in any specific period. The flamed red and white tulips, the pink and white roses and the reddish opium poppy were fashionable throughout the century.¹⁷ He picked them specifically, it seems, for their colour combination. Among the characteristic aspects of Van Beyeren’s paintings is the fact that his flowers are already past full bloom. In combination with the pocket watch, they perhaps refer to the passing of time and the transience of life.¹⁸

Erlend de Groot, 2022

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

Literature

R. Warner, Dutch and Flemish Flower and Fruit Painters of the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries: Comprising 280 Illustrations, Representing 104 Masters, London 1928, p. 23; A.P.A. Vorenkamp, Bijdrage tot de geschiedenis van het Hollandsch stilleven in de zeventiende eeuw, diss. Leiden University 1933, p. 118; Van Leeuwen in E. de Jongh et al., Still-Life in the Age of Rembrandt, exh. cat. Auckland (Auckland City Art Gallery) 1982, pp. 158-61, no. 29; S. Segal and M. Roding, De tulp en de kunst: Verhaal van een symbool, exh. cat. Amsterdam (De Nieuwe Kerk) 1994, pp. 105, 110; E. Gemar-Koeltzsch, Holländische Stillebenmaler im 17. Jahrhundert, II, Lingen 1995, pp. 94-95, no. 28/10; P. Taylor, Dutch Flower Painting, 1600-1720, New Haven/London 1995, pp. 49-51, 100, 171-72

Collection catalogues

1870, p. 137, no. 291 (as Rachel Ruysch); 1880, p. 47, no. 23; 1887, p. 12, no. 85; 1903, p. 49, no. 506; 1960, p. 40, no. 506; 1976, p. 115, no. A 355

Citation

Erlend de Groot, 2022, 'Abraham van Beyeren, Still Life with Flowers, c. 1660 - 1690', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.6028

(accessed 26 September 2024 22:22:25).