For the next 10 minutes, we are going to be looking together at 'Flowers in
a Terracotta Vase' by the Dutch painter Jan van Huysum painted between 1736 and 1737.
We're going to admire its astonishing realism and get up really close, admiring the many blooms and
enjoying the astonishing detail with which he paints. At the centre of the composition
is a terracotta vase decorated in light relief with 'putti', or young children, and swirling scrolls.
From it explodes a firework of colour and texture and form, falling over the sides of the vase and
extending into the space beyond the niche within which the vase sits. The vase is lifted into this
sculptural niche by a marble plinth, as though it's a classical sculpture that is there to be admired.
The light in the composition falls from the upper left, creating this soft glow on the
right hand side of the niche and shrouding the left side of the niche in darkness.
This light also allows Van Huysum to interrogate the different surface textures of the objects
depicted in the composition. You almost feel as though you want to reach out and touch the
razor sharp edges of the poppy leaves, or touch the fluffy feathery texture of this salmon pink peony.
You're also drawn in by the idea of the sweet aroma that a bouquet such as this would give off,
or perhaps gentle noises such as the soft purr of the flapping butterfly wings. You may also
have noticed the unusual perspective in this painting. We're looking up at the vase from below.
This may be suggestive of its original placement, perhaps embedded into the interior architecture of
a space set some distance from the ground, maybe above a mantelpiece or something similar. The
placement of the painting probably also attests to the unusual shape of the top of the canvas.
Van Huysum depicts over 30 different species of flower in this composition. As is the case now, the
Netherlands were the epicentre of horticulture and were known internationally for growing and trading
different species of flowers, and artists were all competing to depict the most elaborate arrangement
of species for their clients. The flower most associated with the Netherlands is of course
the tulip, and while today we can pick up a bunch of tulips for a very reasonable price,
in the 1630s, about a century before this painting was painted, a single tulip bulb could be sold for
as much as a very smart canalside house in the centre of Amsterdam. Van Huysum has depicted the
'semper augustus' variety, which was among the most rare and coveted varieties of tulips.
You'll see that it has this wonderful raspberry ripple effect with these fine red lines being
pulled through these pure white petals. The tulip in the foreground is a little more
discoloured and the petals are slightly more furled than its fresher counterpart behind it.
This is perhaps Van Huysum hinting to the brevity of life, or it may just be him making the point
that painted flowers, of course, last in perpetuity, while fresh flowers have an expiry date and will
eventually rot and die. However by the 18th century the hyacinth had surpassed the tulip as the most
popular variety in the Netherlands, and we can see Van Huysum painting the hyacinth on the left side
of the composition, both a blue and a white variety. The hyacinth originally came from the eastern
Mediterranean and was imported to the Netherlands in the late 16th century. Interestingly, it was
popularised in Europe by Madame de Pompadour, the mistress of Louis XV, the king of France,
who admired it for its variety of colour and its incredible sweet aroma. She filled the palace and
the gardens at Versailles with the sweet smell of this magnificent flower as well as these very
popular varieties. Van Huysum has included many other species of flower including nasturtium,
narcissi, apple blossom rose, and at the bottom of the canvas, anchoring the vase to the centre,
is this magnificent blue morning glory. Notice the attention and sensitivity given to the difference
in shading between the inside of the flower, and the outside of the flower. From this blue flower,
our eye is drawn up to another cluster of blue petals, and that is the English iris. Van Huysum has
depicted the petals of this flower with assiduous detail, taking the care to paint the individual
ridges on the petal and the sheen on the smooth stem and leaves below. Our eye is drawn around the
painting from one colour to the next, from one end of one stem to the other end of another, and also
our eye follows these wonderful furling tendrils. It's not dissimilar to an abstract painting, a sort
of visual game of snakes and ladders if you like, as our eye is pulled from one part of the canvas
to another. In a different way to earlier flower painters and earlier examples by Van Huysum, this
painting served more of a decorative purpose in its large scale with its light background and
super abundance of detail. Earlier compositions by artists such as Ambrosius Bosschaert and
Jan Brueghel the Elder were more intent of showing each individual bloom in its best light and
giving a real sense of three-dimensionality to the bouquet, setting it against a very dark background.
The horticulturalists among you will have realised that a bouquet such as this is almost impossible
to pull together. Artists from the period would have made drawings from individual blooms,
returning to them throughout the year to create this magnificent compilation of flowers that
blossom from spring through to autumn. We know that Van Huysum had his own garden full of magnificent
flowers and that he was actually painting from life. He writes to one patron explaining that
their painting is going to be delayed because he was unable to obtain a specific yellow rose.
This might explain why Van Huysum has dated his painting both 1736 and 1737, suggesting that it
may have been completed over two years. Our eye is also drawn into the painting by other magnificent
details. These very viscous water droplets that are suspended on the velvety surface of the poppy leaf,
that feel as though at any moment they're going to run off the surface of the leaf onto
the ground below. They also refract the light that enters the composition from upper left.
Van Huysum has taken great care to depict the individual insects in the
painting. Notice butterflies, tiny ants on the leaves of the rose and the peony,
and a fly just resting on the front of the marble plinth there. The exact representation of insects
was very symptomatic of the dutch interest in the wider natural world during the early modern period.
There had been experiments with various lenses, the invention of the microscope,
and the magnifying glass was being used to catalogue insects and look at them in great detail.
Van Huysum's exquisite and faithful representations of the fly and the butterfly here
are emblematic of that. The lower part of the canvas is a symphony of wonderful textures. For
example, we can see how these marble-like grapes which are catching the sheen of the light on their
musty skins are set against this beautiful winding thorny rose stem that draws our eye from the right
side to the left side of the canvas. This in turn is set against a very smooth but gnarly walnut
and it leads our eye to this magnificent bird's nest, a swirling whirlpool of fine twigs and mosses
and downy feathers, and you will notice that there are five eggs at the centre of the nest, and
Van Huysum has taken the care to document a small feather stuck to the surface of one of the egg.s
We know that the bird's nest was added later on in the painting process and that might explain
why it feels somewhat awkward in the composition, as though it's about to slip off the plinth.
Jan van Huysum's extraordinary talent for depicting such a wide range of textures in such fine detail
is the reason that he enjoyed such a successful and wealthy career. He was painting for some of
the most important people across Europe, including the kings of Poland and Prussia,
the Duke of Oleon, and even Sir Robert Walpole here in England. Despite this wide-reaching fame and
popularity, Van Huysum spent his entire life living in Amsterdam, making short visits to nearby Haarlem
to document the flowers. As was common in the low countries during this period, Van Huysum came from
a family of painters. He was probably trained by his father, who was a decorative artist and an art
dealer, and his three brothers were painters, and his daughter went on to become a painter as well.
He was said to be quite an awkward character and immensely secretive. He forbade anyone from
entering his studio, even his three brothers, should they see how he mixed and applied his pigments.
However, shortly following his death, he was dubbed the phoenix of flower painters, and he certainly
was the most important still-life painter at the end of this period, that had really kicked off in
the first decade of the 17th century. 'Flowers in a Terracotta Vase' really is one of the finest
examples of Van Huysum's extraordinary ability to crystallise nature into one single moment. While he
went on to have enormous impact and influence on future generations of artists, this painting really
stands as a magnificent bookend to one of the most important painting genres in Dutch history.