Still Life4.

A frequent subject for Dutch art at the time was flowers in a vase. As the Netherlands and Amsterdam became the biggest producer of flowers, an arranged bouquet was a perfectly adequate subject and was usually painted with oil on canvas.

If you look carefully at some of the flower arrangements you may notice that some feature plants which flower in different seasons so we know that they couldn’t have been painted together from life.

The artist would make studies of plants in season and then put them together in one composition. Artists would also have various ‘props’ such as vases, bowls in their studios which would recur in different paintings.