Vase with Flowers, c.1720 Jan van Huysum (1682-1749)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

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Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 8-9 weeks to complete the process.

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Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
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A bird’s nest glows at the lower right, three chalk-pale eggs cushioned by wiry straw and a single pin-prick highlight that feels almost audible, like a tap of porcelain. From this quiet corner the bouquet rears upward, a vertical surge against darkness. Orange crown lilies, a ruffled white peony, streaked tulips, midnight irises, morning-glory blues and small field flowers accumulate into a theatrically staged profusion. Light falls in oblique planes, catching the satin of petals, then dissolving into umber and bottle-green leaves. Titled “Vase with Flowers, c.1720”, the picture hangs today in Dulwich Picture Gallery, London.

Consider the bend in the long tulip stem: it arcs leftward, then snaps back, a calligraphic flourish that sets the rhythm for the whole arrangement. Deliberately, van Huysum lets some petals slacken and bruise; others are crisp as newly cut parchment. Cerulean irises cool the center while vermilion bells heat the upper zone. Scattered whites – rose, peony, small daisies – act like flares, spacing the light across the bouquet so the black ground reads as deep space rather than mere backdrop.

Jan van Huysum builds his surfaces through glazing, thin translucent layers that seal color like sweets under glass. He keeps the panel sleek, almost porcelain-smooth, so small accents read with piercing clarity: the hair-thin veining on the tulip, a dusting of pollen at a pistil’s tip, the brownish seam where a green glaze overlaps a red shadow. One notices a telling quirk – a zigzag, feather-edged stroke used to articulate the peony’s frilled edges – repeated just enough to signal the hand at work, then withheld elsewhere to avoid mannerism.

Born after the Dutch Golden Age, Jan van Huysum became the eighteenth century’s most sought-after still-life painter, and prices followed his reputation. In this dark-ground bouquet he cultivates grandeur through contrast and curvature, indebted to the elegant scrolls of the French Rococo. Around this date he would soon pivot to lighter backgrounds and garden settings, yet here he keeps the stage black, letting light pool around blossoms to model them as sculpture. The nest at bottom right acts like a basso continuo, anchoring the vertical thrust with a domestic note.

Comparison clarifies his ambition. Rachel Ruysch’s airy bouquets arrange flowers by species and season with botanical grace; Jan van Huysum prefers theatrical excess, mixing spring and summer, cultivated and wild, to court artifice. Perhaps those unhatched eggs hint at time held in suspension, abundance stilled before it scatters. One might imagine distant bells across a canal, the flowers’ scent dense as wax and citrus, the room cool despite the implied warmth of vermilion lilies.

Look long enough and the bouquet becomes a study in control and release – stems looping like pen strokes, petals caught just before collapse. Jan van Huysum calibrates abundance with discipline, making darkness feel inhabited and light hard-won. In an age of instant images, this picture slows the pulse. It rewards patience, not display, and teaches how attention can turn paint into breath.