Jan Van Huysum

Van Huysum once held up a painting for a year because he could not find the right yellow rose. He insisted on painting from fresh-cut flowers, assembling arrangements over months as different species came into season, and if a particular bloom was unavailable, the canvas waited. His clients, who included princes and a British prime minister, had no choice but to be patient. He was born in Amsterdam in 1682 into a family of painters. His father Justus van Huysum the Elder was a flower painter, and several brothers also worked in the genre. Jan surpassed them all. By mid-career his flower pieces were selling for four to five times the price of a Rembrandt. Prince William of Hesse and Sir Robert Walpole were among his buyers. No Dutch flower painter before or since has commanded comparable prices in their own lifetime. His method demanded obsessive secrecy. He barred everyone from his studio, including his own brothers, for fear they would learn how he purified and mixed his colours. He took on few students. One of them, Margareta Haverman, apparently produced work so accomplished that Van Huysum expelled her out of jealousy; she went on to become one of only two women admitted to the Academie Royale in Paris in the eighteenth century. He also travelled regularly to horticultural centres like Haarlem to sketch rare and unusual specimens. Van Huysum and his wife Elisabeth Takens had twelve children, but only three survived their parents. He produced around two hundred paintings over his career, almost all of them flowers and fruit against light, airy backgrounds that broke with the dark grounds favoured by earlier Dutch flower painters. He died in Amsterdam in 1749, at sixty-six.