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| Georg Flegel (Olmütz, Moravia 1566 - Frankfurt am Main 1638)
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| Still Life of flowers in a vase and a goblet, with a frog and two pears
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Oil on copper
6 7/8 x 5 in. (17.5 x 12.7 cm.)
Provenance: Private Collection, Germany.
Georg Flegel is considered, along with Sebastian Stoskopff (1597-1657), the most important German still-life painter of the first half of the seventeenth century. Born in Moravia in 1566, Flegel moved to Vienna aged 14, and there became assistant to Lucas van Valkenborch the Elder, whom he followed to Frankfurt, then an important centre for art dealing and publishing. Initially he provided staffage for the latter’s compositions, adding still-life elements, such as fruit, flowers and kitchen utensils. Following Valkenborch’s death in 1597, Flegel purchased citizenship in Frankfurt, where he was to work as an independent master until old age. He specialized in still lifes of meals and cupboards, executed with such precision and attention to detail that he won an international reputation and was feted ‘as a second Apelles and Dürer...with astute mind and skilled hands.’
The Colnaghi still life is a persuasive example of Flegel’s talents. Executed on copper, it typifies the artist’s ability to capture a variety of surface textures with cool objectivity. Although small, it features objects of rarity and value and was most likely painted for a connoisseur. The pokal on the left shows similarities to the works of goldsmiths active at the court of Rudolf II in Prague, such as Ottavio Miseroni or Jan Vermeyn, while the red vase on the right, delicately decorated with floral ornaments, is similar to objects produced in the town of Siegburg in the sixteenth century. The flowers were also admired as objects of great beauty and interest at the time. A number of the blooms in the present work relate to watercolours by the artist now in the Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin. Flegel produced about 110 such works between c. 1600 and 1630, and they may be considered as general preparatory studies for a number of his paintings. In this still life, for example, the snowbells, the pears and tulip may relate to three of the watercolours in Berlin.
The present painting relates very closely to a still life on panel of similar dimensions in a private collection. In the catalogue of the 1993 exhibition Georg Flegel (Historisches Museum, Frankfurt am Main), this panel is dated to the late 1620’s and a similar date should be advanced for the Colnaghi picture. Both paintings feature the same arrangement of objects although there are also differences between the two. Our work is, for example, less tightly spaced and features a different group of flowers in the vase. A number of the elements recur in other still lifes by Flegel. The pokal on the left can be found in a large collaborative work (possibly with Marten van Valkenborch) in a private collection. The frog appears in two small works on copper in the Historisches Museum, Frankfurt am Main, where it is shown resting on two coins, as in our composition. Flegel also depicts the same animal resting on a ring in the above variant of the present work, and again sittting on a single coin in a floral still life in a private collection. The motif of the frog may derive from the works of Joris Hoefnagel (1542-1601), whose works Flegel must have seen in Frankfurt.
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P. and D. Colnaghi and Co., Ltd - 15 Old Bond Street London W1S 4AX, United Kingdom Tel: +44-20-7491 7408 Fax: +44-20-7491 8851 contact@colnaghi.co.uk
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