Still life of Flowers in a Glass Vase on a Stone Plinth

(Jan Baptist van Fornenburgh)

The career of J.B. van Fornenburgh remains something of a mystery. Although his birth has now been placed circa 1585 and a firm date has been determined by which he was already dead we may only speculate as to his primary influences. His pictures have been compared with those of the Utrecht and Middleburg artists, Balthasar van der Ast, his brother in law Ambrosius Bosschaert and the latter’s sons, Ambrosius, Johannes and Abraham.

According to Peter Mitchell, Fornenburgh was active from 1608, which would make him slightly younger than Van der Ast or the senior Bosschaert. Another notable characteristic of his work, particularly obvious in our picture, was to set the flowers and stone base in a broader and deeper space. He seems to have had some knowledge of the floral compositions of Roelandt Savery and Sam Segal recognizes this connection in a painting he compares with a composition of Savery in the Central Museum in Utrecht (dated 1624).

Fornenburgh’s overall color scheme was generally more sober than Bosschaert or Van der Ast but like Savery and the Bosschaerts he has a love for the inclusion of small lizards and insects, but these are placed as incidental accents, leading the eye in different directions and do not crowd the bouquets as in the work of Savery.

The most direct influence on Fornenburgh was probably Jacques II de Gheyn, who, to his contemporaries, was the greatest flower painter of the age. Fornenburgh joined the Hague guild in 1629 when he had already been working for two decades but only twenty-two finished floral still lifes have been firmly attributed to him. The artist also painted still lifes of fruit or objects, some including a dead bird, both in oils and in watercolors on parchment. The composition is dominated by a central white lily, between three splendid white and red-striped tulips placed in a plain glass vase. Two roses flank the lower part of the composition, a trail of forget-me-nots and lily of the valley hang below. We see a lizard, looking up at an insect to the left of the stone plinth and a snail perched precariously on the right foreground edge. A butterfly is poised on a leaf, balancing at right a hovering bee that waits to alight upon the bouquet.

Carefully orienting the perspective on the left, with a vanishing point out of sight in the lower left, the artist has confused the viewer with the line of the right side indicating the front of the plinth to be narrower than the rear. The earliest dated picture is given by H.E. van Gelder as 1608, the latest to 1635 and we may probably place our painting somewhere between the two.