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Still life of tulips, roses, narcissus, forget-me-nots, a carnation and other flowers in a glass vase, resting on a table with a sprig of rosemary and an insect

(c. 1620 Belgium)

Colnaghi

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Charrière de Severy, Château de Severy, Lausanne; Private collection, Switzerland; With Bob Haboldt, Paris, from whom purchased in 2001 by the present collector.

This hitherto unpublished painting is a very fine early work by Jan Brueghel the Younger, painted at a time when he was working very closely with his father. Born in Antwerp in 1601, Jan Brueghel the Younger probably trained in the studio of his father, Jan Brueghel the Elder, before travelling to Milan in 1622 to meet his father’s patron, Cardinal Federico Borromeo. The Cardinal was his father's patron and the man for whom he had painted his first flower piece, the Large Bouquet of Flowers in an Earthenware Vase, now in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan. In the spring of 1624 Jan the Younger went to Palermo with his friend from childhood, Antony van Dyck, but he returned to Antwerp in 1625 at death of his father, two sisters and a brother from cholera. As might be expected, his artistic output was to a large degree based on the models and prototypes of his father and, both before and after the trip to Italy, Jan the Younger continued to draw inspiration directly from his father’s work.
While most of the Bernehimer-Colnaghi still-life is executed in a relatively loose manner characteristic of Jan the Younger, some details, as Ertz has noted are tighter and more controlled. The tulips, for example, are very finely painted and very three-dimensional in form, and they are of such high quality that Ertz believes they may have been painted by Jan the Elder . An alternative possibility is that the picture might have been painted by Jan the Younger working closely under the direction of his father. But whether or not the picture is in fact a collaborative work or was painted by Jan the Younger under the influence of his father, the very high quality of its execution and the closeness of the handling of some of the details to the manner of Jan the Elder, indicate that it must date from the early 1620s, while Jan the Younger was still in his father's studio and before he departed for Italy.
There is a slightly smaller variant of the present work, Flowers in a Glass Vase with a Poem, formerly on the London art market and now in a private collection , where the bouquet and setting are the same, but a poem about the ephemeral nature of worldly things is included written on a sheet of paper attached to the ledge. This painting was formerly given to Jan Brueghel the Elder, but reattributed by Ertz entirely to Jan Brueghel the Younger.
This picture, which is dated by Ertz c. 1620, may well have been inspired by the Bernheimer-Colnaghi prototype as an elaboration of the prime version of this composition. This small and exquisitely painted still-life on copper, executed by Jan Brueghel II possibly under the direction of and with some assistance from his father, is a notable addition to the oeuvre of Jan Brueghel the Younger, which is to be included in the forthcoming addendum to the catalogue raisonné of the works of Jan Brueghel the Younger by Klaus Ertz.