Flowers in a Glass (1606): Art, History and Details

Flowers in a Glass (1606) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Ambrosius Bosschaert (Dutch, 1573–1621).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

One of the first artists to specialize in flower painting, Ambrosius Bosschaert may have been inspired by the botanical gardens and scientific collections in his hometown of Middelburg. The flowers in this bouquet might be common today, but in the 1600s they were costly rarities. Bosschaert captured their fragile beauty with luminous colors and exquisite detail.

Object facts

• Title: Flowers in a Glass
• Date: 1606
• Creator attribution: Ambrosius Bosschaert (Dutch, 1573–1621)
• Culture: Netherlands
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on copper
• Dimensions: Framed: 60.3 x 52.8 x 6.4 cm (23 3/4 x 20 13/16 x 2 1/2 in.); Unframed: 35.6 x 29.3 cm (14 x 11 9/16 in.)
• Collection: P - Netherlandish-Dutch
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1960.108

A detail from the museum

Snails, butterflies, moths, dragonflies, and other insects make this "still life" come alive!

Collection credit

Gift of Carrie Moss Halle in memory of Salmon Portland Halle

Further reading listed by the museum

• "Accessions of American and Canadian Museums." The Art Quarterly 28, no. 3 (Autumn 1965): 209-224.
• Lee, Sherman E. "Year in Review." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 52, no. 9 (1965): 124-57.
• Stechow, Wolfgang. "Ambrosius Bosschaert Still LIfe." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 53, no. 3 (March 1966): 59-65.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.