Flowers in a Vase (c. 1669): Art, History and Details

Flowers in a Vase (c. 1669) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Simon Verelst (Dutch, 1644–1721).

The work and its context

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

With just a few flowers, Verelst created a composition of great sophistication and balance. A simple glass flask is filled with a large rose, a red anemone, and a white narcissus tinged with pink. These flowers are surrounded by a scattering of smaller blossoms. Like many still-life painters, Verelst depicted a window reflected in the glass vase, but here he did not show the window's precise structure. He did, however, use another common device: the depiction of a few chips in the stone surface to make the material seem more tangible. Early in his career, Verelst moved from Holland to London, where he worked for the court of King James II and was extravagantly praised for the realism of his flower paintings.

Object facts

• Title: Flowers in a Vase
• Date: c. 1669
• Creator attribution: Simon Verelst (Dutch, 1644–1721)
• Culture: Netherlands
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on wood
• Dimensions: Framed: 41 x 37 x 5 cm (16 1/8 x 14 9/16 x 1 15/16 in.); Unframed: 26.4 x 22.6 cm (10 3/8 x 8 7/8 in.)
• Collection: P - Netherlandish-Dutch
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1982.246

Collection credit

Gift of Mrs. Noah L. Butkin

Further reading listed by the museum

• Warner, Ralph E. Dutch and Flemish Flower and Fruit Painters of the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries. London, United Kingdom: Mills & Boon, 1928.
• Chong, Alan, W T. Kloek, and Celeste Brusati. Still-life Paintings from the Netherlands, 1550-1720. Zwolle, Netherlands: Waanders Publishers, 1999.

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.