With Johnny van Haeften, 🌊1989, from whom acquired by the father of the p🅰resent owner;

Thence by inheritance.

P. Taylor, in Dutch Flower Painting 1600–1750, exh. cat., London 1996, 🌜p. 42, no. 8, and p. 44, reproduced p. 45.

London, Dulwich Picture Gallery, Dutch Flower Painting 1600–1750, 1996, no. 8.

When Balthasar van der Ast's parents died in 1609 he went to live with his sister, who five years earlier had married Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder. It was therefore with some inevitability that Balthasar too would become a painter and progress to become Bosschaert's greatest pupil. Van der Ast joined the guild in Utrecht in 1619 at roughly the same time as Roelandt Savery (1576–1639). From Savery he acquired a fascination for the depiction of strange insects and creatures. His style is something of a fusion of the purity of Bosschaert's colour and the softer tonality of Savery: Van der Ast tends to soften the edges of his blooms where Bosschaert’s end sharply.

In his compositions Van der Ast was one of the most inventive of still-life painters. Here he animates the scene with an arrangement of three rare shells that bespeak the taste for the exotic, which emerged in Holland in the early seventeenth century, principally through the foundation of the Dutch East India Company and other trading organisations. Next to them he places a spider and a large grasshopper, as eye-catching as the bouquet itself. We see here too, his mastery in the three-dimensional depiction of the bulbous glass vase, in which we can make out the water level and each stem within it. As Paul Taylor stated in the 1996 exhibition, Van der Ast actually surpasses his master’s ability to depict such vessels. Nevertheless it is of course the blooms themselves that dominate the composition. The artist clearly took great pleasure in the inte🔯rmingling of blues, oranges, reds, pinks, greens, yellows and whites, extending the bouquet to lend it a great sense of verticality, typical of his tendency to elongation that achieves a ‘loose-limbed elegance, natural grace’.