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ROELANDT SAVERY (COURTRAI 1576-1639 UTRECHT) An iris, a tulip, roses and other flowers in a glass beaker, with a lizard and a dragonfly, in a niche
作品估价：GBP 800,000 - 1,200,000
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图录号：
18
拍品名称：
ROELANDT SAVERY (COURTRAI 1576-1639 UTRECHT) An iris, a tulip, roses and other flowers in a glass beaker, with a lizard and a dragonfly, in a niche
拍品描述：
ROELANDT SAVERY (COURTRAI 1576-1639 UTRECHT)
An iris, a tulip, roses and other flowers in a glass beaker, with a lizard and a dragonfly, in a niche
signed and dated 'R. SAVERY. 1612' (lower left)
oil on copper
6 ¾ x 5 3/8 in. (16.7 x 13.5 cm.)N. Hickman, Kidlington, Oxford.
F.C. Wellstood.
Mrs. H.W. Baker.
with Eugene Slatter, London, 1957.
Anonymous sale [Private collection, Scotland]; Christie’s, London, 11 July 1980, lot 115, when acquired for £85,000 by the following,
with John Mitchell & Son, London.
Private collection, Aerdenhout, The Netherlands, from 1981 to before or until 1985.
Robert H. Smith, Washington, DC, and Arlington, Virginia, by 1985 until 1988.
Private collection, Germany, 1988; Sotheby’s, London, 12 July 2001, lot 40 (£1,763,500), when acquired by the present owner.M.-L. Hairs, Les Peintres Flamands De Fleurs, II, Brussels, 1965, p. 401.
J.A. Spicer, The Drawings of Roelandt Savery, PhD dissertation, Yale University, 1979 (published Ann Arbor 1982), p. 385.
L.J. Bol, ‘Goede onbekenden Schilders van het vroege Nederlandse bloemstuk met klein gedierte als bijwerk. Roelandt Savery (1576-1639)’, Tableau, III, 1981, p. 756, illustrated.
L.J. Bol, 'Goede onbekenden’, Hedendaagse herkenning en waardering van verscholen, voorbijgezien en oderschat talent, Utrecht, 1982, pp. 69-71, fig. 3.
S. Segal, 'The Flower Pieces of Roelandt Savery', Leidse Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 1982, p. 335, under note 14.
M.-L. Hairs, The Flemish Flower Painters in the XVllth Century, Brussels, 1985, p. 215, pl. 71.
T. de Costa Kaufmann, L'Ecole de Prague. La peinture à la cour de Rodolphe II, Paris, 1985, p. 285, no. 19/60, illustrated.
K.J. Müllenmeister, Roelant Savery: Die Gemälde mit kritischem Oeuvrekatalog, Freren, 1988, pp. 55, 168, 171, 329-330, no. 274, pl. 55.
G.J.M. Weber, Stilleben alter Meister in der Kasseler Gemäldegalerie, Melsungen, 1989, p. 28, no. 22.Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum and Utrecht, Centraal Museum, Roelant Savery in seiner Zeit (1576-1639), 28 September-16 February 1986, no. 12.
Kassel, Museum Schloss Wilhelmshöhe, 1994-1995, on loan.
The Hague, The Mauritshuis, 1995-2001, on loan.This exquisite still life, no larger than the page of a book, belongs to a small group of approximately thirty known flower pictures by Roelandt Savery (Müllenmeister,
op. cit., catalogued twenty-five such works, while five additional paintings have come to light since the publication of his catalogue raisonné and subsequent supplement). These paintings comprise only about a tenth of Savery's known
oeuvre yet occupy an important place in the development of flower painting in the Lowlands.
While Savery’s flower still lifes have typically been discussed in the context of his contemporaries Jan Brueghel the Elder and Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder, it has become clear that Savery preceded them both by reaching a peak in the genre before either had even begun to paint flower bouquets, with his two pictures of 1603 being the earliest dated oil paintings in the Flemish-Dutch tradition of the genre (Utrecht, Centraal Museum, inv. no. 6316; and Private collection, formerly Vienna, Carl Widakowich collection). Born in the Flemish city of Courterai, Savery and his family made their way to the northern Netherlands during the religious upheavals of the 1580s, settling in Haarlem where his elder brother Jacob entered the painters’ guild in 1587. Roelandt studied under Jacob, who appears to have preceded him both as a painter of flowers and animals, and accompanied him to Amsterdam, where he remained until Jacob’s death in 1603. It is in the autumn of this year that Savery may have arrived in Prague, where he served Emperor Rudolf II until his death in January of 1612, remaining as court painter to his brother Emperor Matthias until 1613 before returning to Amsterdam.
The present picture’s date of 1612 significantly places it at the end of Savery’s stay in Prague and is one of only four surviving dated still lifes by the artist from the time of his imperial employment (the others being that in Vaduz-Vienna, Liechtenstein, The Princely Collections, inv. no. GE789, dated 1612; Private collection, UK, dated 1611; and Private collection, Austria, dated 1609). While traditional schemes of representation were employed in Rudolfine nature painting, Savery achieved extraordinary variety with a subject that could otherwise be considered invariable. The transformation of flower painting at the imperial court can be closely related to the cultural milieu that Rudolf II’s own interests sponsored in Prague, with the Emperor praised by the botanist Emanuel Sweerts in 1612 as the ‘greatest and most enthusiastic admirer’ of flowers ‘as well as of the arts’ (
Florilegium Amplissimum et Selectissimum, Frankfurt, 1612). Indeed, Rudolf set up his own botanical garden in Prague, for which perhaps the first permanent orangery in Europe was constructed, as well as a zoo in 1576. His
Kunstkammer served as a major repository of
naturalia, with texts on natural history, books with painted nature studies, compendia of earlier miniatures and works painted for Rudolf by Joris Hoefnagel, all of which informed Savery’s visual vocabulary.
Unlike Brueghel and Bosschaert, Savery never repeated a flower from the same perspective and tended to eschew flowers that the two regularly depicted, instead opting for some species not found in their works; as many as one hundred and fifty varieties of flowers, and seventy types of insects and small animals have been counted in Savery’s intimate
oeuvre of still life paintings (S. Segal,
Roelant Savery in seiner Zeit, op. cit., p. 61). While his botanical sources must have included real specimens and drawings made seasonally from life, probably from Rudolf’s own gardens, Savery also likely relied on printed sources and miniatures, particularly those of Joris Hoefnagel (fig. 1), whom he in effect succeeded at Rudolf II’s court.
Savery stretched his approaches to flower painting in such a way that he developed new conventions as well as new categories, elevating the genre to a plane worthy of independent easel painting. This is evidenced here in the combination of flowers, insects and animals, framed within the setting of a dramatic niche. Like Hoefnagel’s miniatures, this small copper invites inspection so intimate that it forces the viewer to within inches of its surface so as to appreciate Savery’s verisimilar treatment, with his diminutive signature and date deliberately inconspicuous at the edge of the niche. In itself a curiosity, it could have sat comfortably within a cabinet of curiosities like Rudolf II’s, among collections of
naturalia and
artificialia, with its perennial blooms outlasting the ephemeral flowers it depicted.
Like his contemporaries Brueghel, Bosschaert and Jacques de Gheyn the Younger, Savery both appealed to a collector’s erudition as well as their aesthetic sense by presenting desired teachings through religious symbolism. The predominant genre of the period became
vanitas, reminding viewers of the fragile and transitory nature of existence, with the earliest known painted
vanitas still life in the Netherlands generally regarded as that by Jacques de Gheyn of 1603 (fig. 2; New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. no. 1974.1). While there has been debate as to the extent that Savery conceived his compositions along similar intellectual lines, floral still lifes by this period were generally aligned with the commonplace
vanitas theme.
Savery here frames his bouquet in a similar stone niche that both extends and recedes beyond the picture plane, the beaker teetering between the thresholds. It is perhaps his background in landscape painting that in part contributes to the atmospheric depth of his flower pieces, with each petal and stalk illuminated with a beatific light from the upper left, casting a shadow on the wall to suggest the behaviour of light. The artist combines varieties of flowers from different countries and seasons into one fantastical moment of blooming: crowned with an iris, its complicated shape both posed an artistic challenge and evoked the Divine Majesty and the Trinity; the large rose in the centre could stand as a symbol of Mary and refer to the love or the Passion of Christ; and the variegated red and yellow tulip documenting the exceptionally rare hybrid specimen that resulted from cross breeding. The lizard, which appeared in the majority of Savery’s flower pieces, could have imaginably been utilised by the artist as a hidden trademark for the learned observer, with its Greek name ‘saûros’ sharing similarities with ‘Savery’, given the frequent confusion with the letters ‘u’ and ‘v’. On the tulip he placed a butterfly, an ancient symbol of the soul, and at opposite ends of the niche, a bluebottle fly and dragonfly, symbolising the transience of life and redemption. By his signature on the ledge, he laid a freshly fallen petal for the wither and fall of life, underscored by the cracks and chips in the stone niche, intimating that not even hard stone could withstand the ravages of time.
Savery’s evident pleasure in his ability to copy nature finds its echoes in the words of Erasmus of Rotterdam, who wrote in his
Convivium Religiosum of 1552: ‘we are twice pleased when we see a painted flower competing with a living one. In one we admire the artifice of nature, in the other the genius of the painter, in each the goodness of God’.
An iris, a tulip, roses and other flowers in a glass beaker, with a lizard and a dragonfly, in a niche
signed and dated 'R. SAVERY. 1612' (lower left)
oil on copper
6 ¾ x 5 3/8 in. (16.7 x 13.5 cm.)N. Hickman, Kidlington, Oxford.
F.C. Wellstood.
Mrs. H.W. Baker.
with Eugene Slatter, London, 1957.
Anonymous sale [Private collection, Scotland]; Christie’s, London, 11 July 1980, lot 115, when acquired for £85,000 by the following,
with John Mitchell & Son, London.
Private collection, Aerdenhout, The Netherlands, from 1981 to before or until 1985.
Robert H. Smith, Washington, DC, and Arlington, Virginia, by 1985 until 1988.
Private collection, Germany, 1988; Sotheby’s, London, 12 July 2001, lot 40 (£1,763,500), when acquired by the present owner.M.-L. Hairs, Les Peintres Flamands De Fleurs, II, Brussels, 1965, p. 401.
J.A. Spicer, The Drawings of Roelandt Savery, PhD dissertation, Yale University, 1979 (published Ann Arbor 1982), p. 385.
L.J. Bol, ‘Goede onbekenden Schilders van het vroege Nederlandse bloemstuk met klein gedierte als bijwerk. Roelandt Savery (1576-1639)’, Tableau, III, 1981, p. 756, illustrated.
L.J. Bol, 'Goede onbekenden’, Hedendaagse herkenning en waardering van verscholen, voorbijgezien en oderschat talent, Utrecht, 1982, pp. 69-71, fig. 3.
S. Segal, 'The Flower Pieces of Roelandt Savery', Leidse Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 1982, p. 335, under note 14.
M.-L. Hairs, The Flemish Flower Painters in the XVllth Century, Brussels, 1985, p. 215, pl. 71.
T. de Costa Kaufmann, L'Ecole de Prague. La peinture à la cour de Rodolphe II, Paris, 1985, p. 285, no. 19/60, illustrated.
K.J. Müllenmeister, Roelant Savery: Die Gemälde mit kritischem Oeuvrekatalog, Freren, 1988, pp. 55, 168, 171, 329-330, no. 274, pl. 55.
G.J.M. Weber, Stilleben alter Meister in der Kasseler Gemäldegalerie, Melsungen, 1989, p. 28, no. 22.Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum and Utrecht, Centraal Museum, Roelant Savery in seiner Zeit (1576-1639), 28 September-16 February 1986, no. 12.
Kassel, Museum Schloss Wilhelmshöhe, 1994-1995, on loan.
The Hague, The Mauritshuis, 1995-2001, on loan.This exquisite still life, no larger than the page of a book, belongs to a small group of approximately thirty known flower pictures by Roelandt Savery (Müllenmeister,
op. cit., catalogued twenty-five such works, while five additional paintings have come to light since the publication of his catalogue raisonné and subsequent supplement). These paintings comprise only about a tenth of Savery's known
oeuvre yet occupy an important place in the development of flower painting in the Lowlands.
While Savery’s flower still lifes have typically been discussed in the context of his contemporaries Jan Brueghel the Elder and Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder, it has become clear that Savery preceded them both by reaching a peak in the genre before either had even begun to paint flower bouquets, with his two pictures of 1603 being the earliest dated oil paintings in the Flemish-Dutch tradition of the genre (Utrecht, Centraal Museum, inv. no. 6316; and Private collection, formerly Vienna, Carl Widakowich collection). Born in the Flemish city of Courterai, Savery and his family made their way to the northern Netherlands during the religious upheavals of the 1580s, settling in Haarlem where his elder brother Jacob entered the painters’ guild in 1587. Roelandt studied under Jacob, who appears to have preceded him both as a painter of flowers and animals, and accompanied him to Amsterdam, where he remained until Jacob’s death in 1603. It is in the autumn of this year that Savery may have arrived in Prague, where he served Emperor Rudolf II until his death in January of 1612, remaining as court painter to his brother Emperor Matthias until 1613 before returning to Amsterdam.
The present picture’s date of 1612 significantly places it at the end of Savery’s stay in Prague and is one of only four surviving dated still lifes by the artist from the time of his imperial employment (the others being that in Vaduz-Vienna, Liechtenstein, The Princely Collections, inv. no. GE789, dated 1612; Private collection, UK, dated 1611; and Private collection, Austria, dated 1609). While traditional schemes of representation were employed in Rudolfine nature painting, Savery achieved extraordinary variety with a subject that could otherwise be considered invariable. The transformation of flower painting at the imperial court can be closely related to the cultural milieu that Rudolf II’s own interests sponsored in Prague, with the Emperor praised by the botanist Emanuel Sweerts in 1612 as the ‘greatest and most enthusiastic admirer’ of flowers ‘as well as of the arts’ (
Florilegium Amplissimum et Selectissimum, Frankfurt, 1612). Indeed, Rudolf set up his own botanical garden in Prague, for which perhaps the first permanent orangery in Europe was constructed, as well as a zoo in 1576. His
Kunstkammer served as a major repository of
naturalia, with texts on natural history, books with painted nature studies, compendia of earlier miniatures and works painted for Rudolf by Joris Hoefnagel, all of which informed Savery’s visual vocabulary.
Unlike Brueghel and Bosschaert, Savery never repeated a flower from the same perspective and tended to eschew flowers that the two regularly depicted, instead opting for some species not found in their works; as many as one hundred and fifty varieties of flowers, and seventy types of insects and small animals have been counted in Savery’s intimate
oeuvre of still life paintings (S. Segal,
Roelant Savery in seiner Zeit, op. cit., p. 61). While his botanical sources must have included real specimens and drawings made seasonally from life, probably from Rudolf’s own gardens, Savery also likely relied on printed sources and miniatures, particularly those of Joris Hoefnagel (fig. 1), whom he in effect succeeded at Rudolf II’s court.
Savery stretched his approaches to flower painting in such a way that he developed new conventions as well as new categories, elevating the genre to a plane worthy of independent easel painting. This is evidenced here in the combination of flowers, insects and animals, framed within the setting of a dramatic niche. Like Hoefnagel’s miniatures, this small copper invites inspection so intimate that it forces the viewer to within inches of its surface so as to appreciate Savery’s verisimilar treatment, with his diminutive signature and date deliberately inconspicuous at the edge of the niche. In itself a curiosity, it could have sat comfortably within a cabinet of curiosities like Rudolf II’s, among collections of
naturalia and
artificialia, with its perennial blooms outlasting the ephemeral flowers it depicted.
Like his contemporaries Brueghel, Bosschaert and Jacques de Gheyn the Younger, Savery both appealed to a collector’s erudition as well as their aesthetic sense by presenting desired teachings through religious symbolism. The predominant genre of the period became
vanitas, reminding viewers of the fragile and transitory nature of existence, with the earliest known painted
vanitas still life in the Netherlands generally regarded as that by Jacques de Gheyn of 1603 (fig. 2; New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. no. 1974.1). While there has been debate as to the extent that Savery conceived his compositions along similar intellectual lines, floral still lifes by this period were generally aligned with the commonplace
vanitas theme.
Savery here frames his bouquet in a similar stone niche that both extends and recedes beyond the picture plane, the beaker teetering between the thresholds. It is perhaps his background in landscape painting that in part contributes to the atmospheric depth of his flower pieces, with each petal and stalk illuminated with a beatific light from the upper left, casting a shadow on the wall to suggest the behaviour of light. The artist combines varieties of flowers from different countries and seasons into one fantastical moment of blooming: crowned with an iris, its complicated shape both posed an artistic challenge and evoked the Divine Majesty and the Trinity; the large rose in the centre could stand as a symbol of Mary and refer to the love or the Passion of Christ; and the variegated red and yellow tulip documenting the exceptionally rare hybrid specimen that resulted from cross breeding. The lizard, which appeared in the majority of Savery’s flower pieces, could have imaginably been utilised by the artist as a hidden trademark for the learned observer, with its Greek name ‘saûros’ sharing similarities with ‘Savery’, given the frequent confusion with the letters ‘u’ and ‘v’. On the tulip he placed a butterfly, an ancient symbol of the soul, and at opposite ends of the niche, a bluebottle fly and dragonfly, symbolising the transience of life and redemption. By his signature on the ledge, he laid a freshly fallen petal for the wither and fall of life, underscored by the cracks and chips in the stone niche, intimating that not even hard stone could withstand the ravages of time.
Savery’s evident pleasure in his ability to copy nature finds its echoes in the words of Erasmus of Rotterdam, who wrote in his
Convivium Religiosum of 1552: ‘we are twice pleased when we see a painted flower competing with a living one. In one we admire the artifice of nature, in the other the genius of the painter, in each the goodness of God’.