Still Life with Tulips

A bouquet bursts from a glass vase packed with green stems — two large red-and-cream tulips at the top surrounded by smaller flowers in red, blue, white, pale yellow and pale purple, a few petals and pink buds fallen to the gray table, a red-and-black beetle on the left and a small blue snail with a white shell crawling along the edge at the right — all against a black wall. Peter Binoit, a German painter active in Cologne in the early seventeenth century, was one of the few German artists of his generation to devote himself to still life, following the new flower-piece tradition that had grown up in Holland and Flanders; this exquisitely finished oil on copper, signed with his monogram and dated 1623, is a jewel of that rare early-Baroque school. The copper was with a Swiss collector by 1971, was sold at Christie’s, London in 2000, and was given to the National Gallery of Art by Robert H. and Clarice Smith in 2012. The painting is held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.