Paintings Drawings Sculptures 2016 - Jean Luc Baroni

Jan Van Huysum
Amsterdam 1682 - 1749
36
Two Still Lives: Grapes on the Vine and other Fruits Spilling out of a Basket onto a Ledge:
Peaches, Plums and Grapes in and around a Vase standing on a Draped Ledge
Both pen and black ink and grey wash, within framing lines. Both signed in grey ink: Jan van Huysum/ fecit.
One bears pencil inscription verso Van Huysum.
The former: 202 x 154 mm (8 x 6 3 /8 in. ); the latter: 202 x 146 mm (8 x 5 3 /4 in.)
Provenance: Private Collection, Germany
Van Huysum was the most revered Dutch still-life
painter of the 18 th century. He belonged to a family
of painters and spent his entire career in Holland,
essentially in Amsterdam. Trained by his father Justus
van Huysum the Elder (1659–1716), he became a
master of both accuracy and invention. Although he
liked to think of himself as a landscape painter, his most
appreciated works by far were and are his elaborate and
exuberant flower paintings of which there are examples
in all the great museum collections. Connoisseurs and
collectors were forced to wait for his works, one, on
impatiently asking for progress was told it would be
at least a year until the next season’s particular yellow
rose appeared for Van Huysum to paint from. Van
Huysum was reportedly secretive about his technique,
forbidding entry to his studio for fear that his methods
of purifying and applying colour would be copied. He
spent a portion of each summer in Haarlem, already a
major horticultural center in his day, in order to study
flowers in bloom. The remarkable similarities in the
shapes and character of individual blossoms in different
still-life paintings indicate, however, that he also used
drawn or painted models to satisfy pictorial demands.
Van Huysum worked in various mediums: oil most
famously but also pen, watercolour and gouache.
Some of the drawings and watercolours appear to be
preparatory for, or possibly records of, paintings, such as
a chalk study in the Metropolitan Museum of Art 1 , which
relates to paintings in the Wallace Collection, London
and on loan to the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. This
could also be true of the present works which have a
subtle liveliness characteristic of the artist’s experience
and skill and particularly remarkable in monochrome.
A comparable example in grey ink and wash, and of
a similar size, is again in the Metropolitan Museum 2 ,
but the present sheets are otherwise relatively unusual
in being on the subject of fruit alone. The detailed
attention to natural form and the dynamic manner in
which plants grow, together with a love of profusion,
are the characteristics which made Van Huysum’s
work so much in demand and which are certainly in
evidence here.
actual size detail
138