Style of Jan van Huysum, 'Flowers in a Stone Vase', 1710-20

Time and inexpert hands have not been kind to this picture. White flowers, difficult to identify with certainty, and heavy full-blown roses loom out of the darkness. A scarlet poppy turns its back to display ragged grey sepals. The flowers have been painted with skill, but the murky background has been considerably darkened with varnish and become badly cracked. Colours have changed, particularly greens that have deepened to a dusky blue.

The background, once much lighter, now adds to the impression that the painting, rather than a celebration of rare and lovely blooms, portrays only death and decay. Usually Dutch pictures of this kind show flowers in varying stages of their life span – buds, half open, in full flower, dying – as in Rachel Ruych’s Flowers in a Vase. It’s sometimes thought that the artists were comparing the transience of the flowers to the transience of all life, including ours. But buds are few in this image, and the colours of those that there are have deepened beyond recognition.

A dark shadow stains one white flower, the other has tinges of yellow. The little blue convolvulus peeps out at the light but the rose petals are turning brown, getting ready to fall. There are no bright, clear colours of the spring flowers usually shown somewhere in such a painting – like in Jan van Huysum’s Flowers in a Terracotta Vase. In this picture we see only blood red, deep blues, misty greys and greens that make the flowers seem unreal, particularly the blue spray that completes the diagonal line running up from left to right. The steep angle of this line gives a sense of insecurity to the picture. If the single leaf just above the two white flowers hadn’t almost disappeared under the varnish, the composition would appear much more balanced.

As it is, the wild, disordered petals of flowers past their prime give a feeling that a sudden autumn wind has passed, leaving the roses nodding, and the single orange nasturtium at the base of the arrangement clinging on but swinging against the foot of the vase. No glistening drop of water trickles down a leaf, and the insect life often shown among the leaves and enlivening these pictures is missing.

These aren’t the only changes to the image. The picture was originally hexagonal. Four triangular sections were patched in at the corners and then roughly covered with black paint, leaving the joints clearly visible. Whether this was done at the same time as the varnished background we don‘t know.

Jan van Huysum is widely considered the finest of the Dutch flower painters, working at the time when pictures of rare blooms such as these were much in demand. He was celebrated internationally and also spectacularly successful financially. But the brush marks in this painting, though accomplished, aren’t his style. We can see his name at the bottom right corner, but it’s not in his handwriting and it’s been added across the join in the panel after it was painted over – so the picture’s authorship must remain unknown.