Still life with flowers in a blue and white vase.
Watercolor, gouache and shell gold over some graphite, on vellum (200 x 150 mm).
Slightly faded overall, with rubbed patches particularly on or about the vase. Presently framed in a black-painted molded frame of period style, 35 x 28.7 x 5 cm overall.
This vellum sheet may be positioned stylistically on a spectrum of painters in and about Frankfurt extending across the seventeenth century from Joris Hoefnagel to Maria Sibylla Merian. Hoefnagel’s small vellum sheet recently acquired by the Metropolitan Museum, Still Life with Flowers, a Snail and Insects, 1589 (inv. 2008.110), exhibits the same restrained red-orange-gold-blue palette with the leafage in gold, the frontal-plane placement, the proportions of the simple vase and robust arrangement filling the sheet, the diagonal symmetry and the naturalistic and objective bent of description. A century later, Merian’s vellum sheets of arrangements in blue and white vases (cf. Fitzwilliam Museum inv. 1146 C; Berlin, Staatliche Museen, Kupferstichkabinett, invs. KdZ 8929 and 8949) retain the same compositional conventions albeit with highly evolved sophistication. Within this spectrum the present sheet might be placed alongside the circle around Georg Flegel (his pupil Jacob Marrel became Merian’s stepfather and teacher). See, for example, Sebastian Stoskopff’s Vase with Flowers, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Strasbourg, datable about 1618, before the artist, stymied from settling in Frankfurt, left Daniel Soreau’s studio for France.
The sheet bears the collector’s stamp of Emanuel-Alfred Beurdeley, whose celebrated collection of fine drawings was dispersed in the 1920’s.
Notes in pencil on verso: “Samlung / von initialen ornamenten / paramenten aus den Mittelalter / par Bernard Höefling / verlag von albert / Metz / Bonn 1855”; “Ecole allemande / 17e Siecle.” The reference, the context of which is unclear, is to Bernhard Höfling, Die Kuenste des Mittelalters, teil 1 (Bonn, Albert Matz & Comp., 1855-7).
Provenance: Emanuel-Alfred Beurdeley (1847-1919) (Lugt 421).
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Price: $3,750
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