Jan Van Kessel The Elder, A Flower Still-Life with Butterflies, Insects and Small Songbirds, 1669. Oil on panel, 22,5 x 17,2 cm. KOETSER GALLERY at TEFAF 2024. © 2024 TEFAF

Provenance: With Jacques Goudstikker, Amsterdam 1933;
Acquired by a Private Collector in 1933;
Thence by descent;
Sotheby’s London, 3 December 2008, lot no. 22;
Koetser Gallery, Zurich;
Private Collection, Geneva, Switzerland;
By descent to present owners.

Literature: M-L. Hairs, The Flemish Flowers Painters in the XVIIth Century. Brussels: 1895, p. 483.
K. Ertz und C. Nitze-Ertz, Die Maler Jan van Kessel. 2012, 309, cat. no. 518.

Signature: Signed and dated lower right: I.V. Kessel fecit, A°1669.

Jan van Kessel was a member of the Brueghel dynasty of painters, for he was Jan Brueghel the Elder's grandson on his mother's side. He was almost certainly trained by his uncle Jan Brueghel the Younger, whose work he copied.1 Even in his formative years he seems to have specialised as a painter of flower pieces. When he was accepted into the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke in 1644-45 he was specifically referred to as a flower painter, and when only a few years later in 1649 Erasmus Quellinus's portrait of him was engraved, it bore a caption describing him as a 'highly esteemed painter of flowers'.

The present panel is an exceptional example of Kessel's maturity, and remains in a remarkable state of preservation. In its simple yet closely observed naturalistic detail and its bright fresh colours it perfectly illustrates the hallmarks of the style that had brought Van Kessel so much success. A simple glass vase stands slightly off-centre to the left of the composition. The simple bouquet consists of two carmine roses, two white and three pink roses and two martagon lilies interspersed with blue and white convolvuli. Around it two pairs of songbirds; finches, bluetits and a wren, a snail caterpillars, insects and numerous butterflies. Even the droplets of water and the spots of rust on the leaves are faithfully recorded. A very closely related version of the composition is recorded by Hairs with the Leger Galleries in London in 1979, where a similar bouquet is set against an unusual pale grey background.2 The two are most easily distinguished by the addition here of the birds. Van Kessel's still lifes normally teem with insects, a reflection of his almost scientific interest in the natural kingdom, which he recorded in beautifully observed and meticulous studies, but it is rare indeed that he chose to introduce birds into his flower pieces. These are more normally found as subjects in their own right or part of wider allegories of the element of air.