Kimbell Art Museum acquires a Jacques de Gheyn II Masterpiece

Saturday, 05 April 2008 01:59

FORT WORTH, TX - The Kimbell Art Museum announced the acquisition of a major painting by Jacques de Gheyn II (1565-1629), one of the founders of flower painting in the Netherlands. Vase of Flowers with a Curtain, dated 1615, is one of the artist’s largest known flower paintings, measuring 43 ¼ x 29 ¼ inches (109.8 x 74.5 cm). De Gheyn never sold it and seems to have kept it in his studio as a showpiece—to demonstrate his skills in this relatively novel artistic genre.

Scholars have long recognized Vase of Flowers with a Curtain as a landmark in the history of flower painting even though it was a “lost” work, kept in a British private collection since 1924, never exhibited in public, and known only in the form of old, black-and-white reproductions. Its reappearance and acquisition by a museum is a significant event in the study of Dutch art. The work adds an important new dimension to the Kimbell’s collection, which hitherto lacked an example of Dutch flower painting or still life.
    
Commented Malcolm Warner, acting director of the Kimbell: “At any given moment there are many fine 17th-century Dutch flower paintings on the art market, most of which represent this particular kind of art perfectly well. The level of skill among its practitioners was so great that frankly it would be difficult to find a bad  example. But for the Kimbell’s collection we were looking for one that was not only technically brilliant and representative of the genre but also quite outstanding in some way—a ‘destination’ piece. Highly unusual and maybe even unique in scale for this early date, and remarkable too for its grandeur and theatricality (note the touch of illusionistic showmanship in the painting of the green curtains), the De Gheyn was our answer.” The Kimbell will put the work on display in its galleries in July.

Jacob de Gheyn II

Jacob de Gheyn was one of the most exceptional draftsmen and printmakers of his generation and admired for his invention and range of subjects. He is also considered one of the fathers of flower painting in the Netherlands.  Before turning to flower painting, De Gheyn trained in Haarlem, serving the great painter and printmaker Hendrik Goltzius (1558-1617). Goltzius was instrumental in teaching De Gheyn the art of drawing, and De Gheyn quickly proved himself a serious rival to his slightly older master—especially in the field of printmaking.  

As a painter, De Gheyn left a very small œuvre. Fewer than fifty paintings by him are known or documented, and of these, twenty-some survive today.  Among the survivors is his Vanitas Still Life  (1603) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. It is widely considered the first vanitas still life in Netherlandish art.  He also painted religious, historical, and mythological subjects.  Some of his pictures were commissioned by members of the House of Orange Nassau, including Prince Maurits of Orange and Prince Frederik Hendrik.

De Gheyn as Flower Painter

De Gheyn’s earliest independent flower paintings were small and on copper. Van Mander describes “a little pot of flowers from life . . . very precisely executed” that De Gheyn sold to the Amsterdam collector Hendrick van Os.  This was reportedly De Gheyn’s first work in oil and, “for a first effort,” writes Van Mander, “wondrous.”  In 1604, De Gheyn produced “a larger pot of flowers” that was sent to the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II.  This was accompanied by an album of flowers, insects, and animals prepared by De Gheyn that survives in the Institut Néerlandais, Paris. That De Gheyn was one of the most sought-after flower painters of his time is most firmly established by the actions of the Dutch parliament.  In 1606, when the French queen, Marie de’ Medici, visited the Dutch Republic, the Dutch parliament could think of no better present for her than one of De Gheyn’s flower paintings, paying the extraordinary sum of 600 guilders.

Only a handful of flower paintings by De Gheyn can be identified today.  Two small works on copper, datable to 1602/4, can be linked to the album purchased by Rudolf II: Vase of Flowers (formerly Brian Koetser Gallery, now untraced) and Still Life with Flowers (collection of Teresa Heinz).  More ambitious in scale are the floral paintings in the Mauritshuis, The Hague (1612), and in the De Villeneuve Collection (1613).  To these can be added the present painting of 1615. Another panel, slightly larger in scale, with an asymmetrical arrangement of flowers in a glass vase and a swathe of drapery—possibly owned by Constantijn Huygens, secretary to Prince Frederik Hendrik, and dating to the 1620s—was last traced to a Dutch private collection; its present whereabouts are unknown.

Vase of Flowers with a Curtain

Vase of Flowers with a Curtain  is an exceptionally large flower painting and seems to have held a great personal interest for De Gheyn.  He may have produced it on commission, but it is more likely that he conceived it as a demonstration piece, something to advertise his impressive achievements in the field of flower painting.  Accordingly, he probably kept the painting with him until his death, bequeathing it to his son, Jacques De Gheyn III.
 
In his efforts to establish flower painting as an independent genre, De Gheyn was joined at the beginning of the seventeenth century by three notable Netherlandish artists: Ambrosius Bosschaert I (1543–1614), Jan Brueghel I (1568–1625), and Roelandt Savery (1576–1639).  There is no apparent link between any of these four artists, and it is generally agreed that they were all producing flower paintings independent of one another.  Bosschaert, Brueghel, and Savery were fairly consistent as flower painters. Their flower paintings are usually very intimate and sometimes painted on copper.  De Gheyn was one of the earliest flower painters to break from this relatively modest format.  With Vase of Flowers with a Curtain, he showed that flower painting offered more exciting possibilities.  The work both acknowledges the birth of the genre with its minutely rendered details and announces the future of the genre with its impressive size and theatrical curtain.

Kimbell Art Museum hours: Tuesday–Thursday and Saturdays, 10 a.m.–5 p.m.; Fridays, noon–8 p.m.; Sundays, noon–5 p.m.; closed Mondays. For general information, call 817-332-8451. Web site: www.kimbellart.org