A Gallery Of Flowers

Flowers, Animals and Insects

At the foot of an oak stump, on which are to be seen butterflies and two birds, one of them in its nest, there are various plants and flowers growing: ox-eye daisies (chrysanthemum leucanthemum), poppies (player rhoeas), cornflowers (centaurea cyanus), the archangel or dead nettle (lamium album), the bramble (rubus), an umbelliferous plant of the wild carrot type, a centaury, a myosotis, an ear of corn and various mushrooms. A whole fauna is crawling about, two snakes, some snails and a vole or field mouse.

Most of the seventeenth-century artists painted civilised flowers: picked in the gardens or fields and arranged artistically in vases, these contributed with their ephemeral grace to the agreeableness of the house. But a small group of painters dehumanised flowers — tried to capture them as an element in the world of life. Already Ambrosius Bosschaert's flowers, and even more so those of Roeland Savery, had brought with them from the gardens where they were picked a whole small  world, active and buzzing. Other painters, later, looked at the flower before the hand of man had severed it from its ties with nature. Among these were the Dutchman Marseus van Schrieck (1619/2o-1678), Abraham Mignon, a German who became Dutch, and later Peter Snyers (1681-1752).

Marseus van Schrieck was a man of strange ways, with a passion for the infinitely small. When he lived in Rome, the Nordic colony nicknamed him Die Snuffelaer (The Ferret), on account of his researches on insects; and when he returned to Holland he lived in a country house near Amsterdam, where he bred insects and reptiles.

Less is known about Abraham Mignon: only that he was baptised at Frankfurt am Main, was a pupil of Jacob Marrel in that town, then had lessons from Jan Davidsz de Heem at Utrecht, and worked there and afterwards at Wetzlar. The picture in the Brussels Museum is perhaps his masterpiece. In it a whole small world creeps and teems, a world where there is birth, living, killing and dying, while modestly the flower spreads its ephemeral innocence in the midst of these unchained instincts and itself helps to transmit the life-principles of some of these small beasts the insects. The monographic realism of the first still-life painters is continued by this artist, but in their pictures living creatures and objects are instinctively brought together within the great organic unity of the cosmos.