Flowers
Oil on wooden panel
50 x 65.5 x 0 cm
Not For Sale
The painting “Flowers” by Jan Brueghel, from the National Museum in Belgrade, is typical of the work of this artist. Owing to his delicate brushwork and the ability to convincingly achieve materialization in the tradition of Flemish realistic painting, he was called Velvet. He earned the nickname Floral, by winning fame for his works dominated by a motif of flowers. Although the natural beauty and variety of flowers were undoubtedly his primary motive in painting still life, because of which collectors wished to own them, Brueghel’s bouquets could not have been completely stripped of the message of ephemerality and decay. Even without stressing the signs of ephemerality, with their fragile structure and intrinsically brief duration, flowers always convey the meaning of vanitas. Thus, the bouquets of Jan Brueghel had to contain certain moral messages in the spirit of the times and the environment where they were created, as well as the symbolism connected with Christ’s sacrifice and the Resurrection that lay in the details, such as the ladybird, the butterfly or the occasional grain of wheat.
Exhibitions with this piece
Rubens' Circles
Rubens and his legacy
The oeuvre of Peter Paul Rubens, an artist who achieved unprecedented fame throughout Europe already at the beginning of his career and whose paintings in the collections of the most powerful patrons of his time were a measure of prestige has given rise to unending debates on his actual contribution to the enormous number of artworks that came out of his studio. It is clear from the enormity of the number of works bearing the mark of his artistry that, despite his exceptional talent, inexhaustible energy, and fabled speed of painting, he could not possibly have produced all of them without the help of his studio, whose size became the stuff of legend.