Jan van Huysum

Jan van Huysum (or Jan van Huijsum) (15 April 1682 – 8 February 1749) is the most notable member of the Van Huysum family of artists working in Dutch Golden Age of the 17th and 18th centuries; "by common consent, Jan van Huysum has been held to be the best painter of flowers." Trained in decoration from a young age, he "gradually developed an execution of details of the utmost beauty and finish" creating "wonderful flower pieces whereon drops of water and crawling ants could be seen without a magnifying glass."

Life and work

Jan was the son of the painter Justus van Huysum and his first wife Margrietje Schouten and the older brother of Jacob van Huysum and Justus van Huysum the Younger. Jan’s much younger half-brother Michiel van Huysum was also a flower painter. His grandfather Jan van Huysum the Elder is said to have been "expeditious in decorating doorways, screens and vases."

Van Huysum primarily lived and worked in the city of Amsterdam. Jan van Huysum and his wife Elisabeth Takens (1680–1751) had 12 children together but only three outlived their parents.

Van Huysum was somewhat secretive about his process and worked separately from the rest of his family.

Jan Van Huysum "holds the highest place among painters of fruit and flowers." His flower-arrangement still lifes, in a style of the period collectively called vanitas and/or Pronkstilleven, are said to possess "an unerring elegance of composition, which enabled him to avoid the imbalance, the overcomposition, that others risked." He painted from "life," meaning fresh-cut flowers, assembling them over time into visual bouquets; sometimes this meant pieces took a year or more as he waited for certain blossoms to come back in season, such as a yellow rose he wanted for 1742 picture. The earlier Dutch artist Jan David de Heem anticipated van Huysum; "if de Heem, by the harmony of his warm golden color, be called the Titian of flowers and fruits, Jan van Huysum’s bright and sunny treatment entitles him to the name of the Corregio of the same branch of art".

Fruit and flower artists whose work is described as inspired by or analogous to that of Jan van Huysum: Jacob van Huysum (his brother), Justus van Huysum (his father), Pieter Faes, Wybrand Hendriks, Paul Theodore van Brussel, Jacobus Linthorst, Jan van Os, George Jacob Jan van Os (son of preceding), Gerard van Spaendonck, Cornelius van Spaendonck (brother of preceding), Coenraet Roepel, Johannes de Bosch, and John Flaxman. (Hope & Co. banking money), and Francis Baring, 5th Baron Ashburton and/or Thomas Baring, 1st Earl of Northbrook (both Barings Bank money). On 19 July 2019 German minister of foreign affairs Heiko Maas personally handed the picture to his Italian counterpart Enzo Moavero Milanesi in Florence and it was restored to the collection of the Uffizi.