BALTHASAR VAN DER AST
Middelburg 1593/94 - 1657 Delft
Ref: CC 229
Still life of roses, shells and insects on a table
Signed lower right: B. van der. Ast
Oil on panel: 5 ½ x 9 5/8 in / 14 x 24.4 cm
Frame size: 9 ¼ x 13 ½ in / 23.5 x 34.3 cm
In a black polished seventeenth century style Dutch frame
Painted circa 1630
Provenance:
Leonard & David Koetser, Geneva, by 1962;
private collection, Florida
Sotheby’s New York, 12th January 1979, lot 45 ($23,000)
Private collection, Belgium
Exhibited:
London, Leonard & David Koetser, Spring Exhibition of Fine Flemish, Dutch and Italian Old Masters, 1962, pp.42-43, no.19, illus.
Balthasar van der Ast was taught by his brother-in-law Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder (1573-1621), the pioneering Middelburg flower painter of the first decades of the seventeenth century. Van der Ast developed the tradition of his mentor, like Bosschaert producing paintings of flowers in vases on ledges, often with a few shells and insects scattered around. Works such as the present one from the 1630s, in which a choice number of blooms and a few shells are placed on a ledge with flying insects, are an innovation of van der Ast. The personality of each flower and shell is brought out by their being placed against neutral backgrounds, with just enough overlapping to bind the composition together.
Van der Ast derives from Bosschaert the sense of sculptural solidity of his objects and exquisite attention to each individual petal or curl of shell, but gives his painting a softness and atmosphere that moves away from the more linear approach of Bosschaert and his own early work. He is not afraid to pose his flowers in unexpected ways, for example the branch of pink roses in this painting, with the blooms resting on the table and the springy, thorny stem floating in the air against the grey-brown background. (Henri Fantin-Latour was to make a similarly striking use of neutral backgrounds in his nineteenth century flower pieces). The roses are shown in three stages of development, as a tight, salmon-pink bud, a young flower gently unfurling and a mature bloom in all its complex glory. This imparts to the painting a sense of time passing and also touches on vanitas: earthly things will flower and fade, but the righteous soul is immortal. This theme is underlined by the forget-me-not, under threat from a devouring caterpillar. By contrast butterflies, like the Red Admiral perched delicately on the rose, often symbolised the flight of the soul to Heaven.
The two shells in the painting would have been sought-after collectors’ items in the seventeenth century, brought back by Dutch sailors venturing to South America, Africa and Asia. They are cone shells. The larger of the two, with its striking ‘abstract’ pattern, is an Aulicus Cone or Princely Cone (Conus aulicus) from the Indo-Pacific, a fish-eating species which kills its prey with a strong toxin that is dangerous even to man.
BALTHASAR VAN DER AST
Middelburg 1593/94 – 1657 Delft
Balthasar van der Ast was born in Middelburg in 1593 or 1594, the son of a wealthy merchant in woollen clothing. He was trained from c.1610 in the studio of his twenty-year-older brother-in-law and guardian Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder (1573-1621). He appears to have taken over the position of the leading painter of still lifes of flowers and fruit in the North Netherlands soon after Bosschaert’s death in 1621. During the 1620s and 1630s, van der Ast’s domicile Utrecht was the main Dutch centre of flower painting; besides van der Ast, among others, Roelant Savery, Johannes Baers, Jacob Marrel and Bosschaert’s sons worked there. In 1632 van der Ast himself moved to Delft where he joined the painters’ guild of St Luke and married the following year. He died there in 1657.
