Flowers in a Terracotta Vase can be found outside Another Planet on West Street
Flowers in a Terracotta Vase, 1736
Jan van Huysum
Oil on canvas, 133.5 x 91.5 cm
This is no shy, hide-in-a-corner painting. It’s meant to dazzle and it does. It would have taken a long time to identify each flower and this is part of the picture’s purpose. Van Huysum is after, and achieves, excess: a celebration of nature, an entertaining puzzle and a display of wealth, culture and fashion.
Read more at NationalGallery.org.uk
Jan van Huysum was the last of the distinguished still life painters active in the Northern Netherlands in the 17th and early 18th centuries, and an internationally celebrated artist in his lifetime. Although he specialised in flower still lifes, van Huysum also painted a few landscapes.
His early works are more concentrated in design than his elaborate later paintings, like the Gallery’s Flowers in a Terracotta Vase, with its lighter background and superabundance of detail.
Read more at NationalGallery.org.uk