Still Life with Flowers in a Glass Vase

Painters of Dutch flower pieces did not work from a vase standing in front of them. They kept studies of individual blooms made at different times of year and assembled the bouquet on the panel, which is why a single picture can hold flowers that never open in the same season. De Heem was born in Utrecht in 1606, learned from his father and then from the still-life painter Balthasar van der Ast, worked for a time in Leiden, and moved to Antwerp in the mid-1630s, where he joined the painters' guild and became a citizen in 1637. He was the leading exponent of what Dutch and Flemish painters called pronkstilleven, a "display" still life of costly and beautiful things assembled to be admired. His work commanded exceptional prices — one flower and fruit painting sold for 2,000 guilders — and contemporaries recorded that he could barely keep up with demand. He painted this one on a copper plate rather than canvas, a support with a hard, smooth surface that holds very fine detail. Three of his nine children became painters, and his pupils included Abraham Mignon and Jacob Marrel, who carried his manner into the next generation. The tradition he defined was still the model a hundred years later, when Anne Vallayer-Coster built her reputation in Paris on flower paintings that look back to Dutch work of this kind.