Vase of Flowers, ca. 1720. Jan van Huysum. Oil on wood panel. Purchase: William Rockhill Nelson Trust.
The 17th-century Dutch were horticultural leaders who introduced Europe to many new species of flowers from their Caribbean and Far Eastern colonies. Huysum gained an international reputation for the technical skill and detailed realism in his sumptuous arrangements of exotic as well as more common specimens. Included here are two rare specimens of tulip (top, left of center), a popular flower originally imported from Constantinople. In the famous market craze of 1637, dubbed Tulipmania, one tulip bulb in Amsterdam was worth the price of a house on a coveted canal lot. The market crashed in 1638, but tulips were still much prized when Huysum painted these blooms a century later.
