Trompe-l’Oeil Still Life with a Flower Garland and a Curtain

A sumptuous garland of some twenty flower varieties — tulip, roses, irises and more — hangs from a dark wall, and at the right a blue curtain is painted drawn aside, as if the viewer had just lifted the protective cloth that Dutch collectors kept over their prized pictures. The Leiden painters Adriaen van der Spelt and Frans van Mieris collaborated on the panel in 1658, van der Spelt painting the flowers and van Mieris the deceptively real curtain, a feat of illusionism that recalled the legendary contest of the Greek painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius. The work hung in the collection of Henric Bugge van Ring in Leyden by 1667 and later in English collections before the Art Institute acquired it in 1949 through the Wirt D. Walker Fund. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.