(piano music playing) Rachel: So we are Dulwich
Picture Gallery in London, and we are standing in
front of Jan van Huysum's Vase with Flowers, from about 1720. It's quite a vase. It's quite a lot of flowers
that we've got here. Pippa: Yeah, it's bombastic
colors spilling out, overflowing, isn't it? It's not a neat flower arrangement that your grandmother might
have slaved over, is it? Rachel: Little sprigs
going off every which way, and flowers leaning, and lots of contrast between
kind of the bright white and light-colored flowers, and then these really deep shadowed, kind of darker-colored flowers. Pippa: And the painting, I mean, when standing here in front of it, really holds up under a microscope. I mean, it's like we're
looking through a microscope. All the detail you have on the leaves. You have a leaf here with a bee on it, and there's a raindrop. You look at the raindrop, it's magnifying tiny lines
of the leaf underneath it. You've got ladybirds, butterflies, all that, just the activity, and the velvety, velvety
texture you feel on that tulip. Rachel: Yeah, you do feel
like if you touched it, it would feel like a real tulip. And imagining how
painstaking it must have been to paint that with these
tiny, tiny little brushes, you know, one and two hairs. Pippa: Yeah, it must have
been just a few more, and it's interesting as well because although it's just flowers, there's definitely something else going on in the picture here, I think. If you look down here,
we have a bird's nest. And in there, we've got eggs, the beginning of life. Rachel: You can follow
this idea of the life cycle because there are eggs
in this bird's nest, which keeps kind of drawing the eye with this incredible attention to detail, and then kind of hiding in the flowers, there's this little naked
boy who is, I think, supposed to be painted
on the vase, probably, Pippa: Yeah, it looks like he's running around the
back of the vase there, doesn't he? Going on from there, we have, like, birth and the beginning of youth, and looking at all the
arrangement of flowers, they're not all in full blooms. Some are budding. Some are spring, coming to life. Some are in bombastic bloom, like this big red chrysanthemum, or whatever it is in the middle there, and then further away,
the ones in the back, in the shade are in the shadow, the sunset of life. The leaves are falling
off, they're browning. Rachel: Yeah. Pippa: And so it does seem
to represent the cycle. Rachel: Maybe it's just me, but my eye does keep just
coming back to that nest, and after death, that cycle renews itself and starts again with the eggs again. Pippa: So you've got the dead twigs and then the birth. Rachel: Yeah. thinking about the flowers, I don't know if all these flowers would necessarily be in bloom
at the same time in a year. Rachel: Yeah. I think
that's sort of typical of Dutch still-life flower
painting at the time, which is including this idea
of the cycle of the seasons, mirroring the cycle of
birth and death and life. Pippa: And the detail. Just if you had this on your wall at home, you just keep coming
back to it, wouldn't you? You'd never get bored with it. There's just more and more
detail in there you can find. Each time I look, I see a butterfly, another little insect
burrowing around in there, and these red ones at the top, I mean, they look like Chinese lanterns. Rachel: And I do think
this is a really good one to play scavenger hunt with and find something new every time because you can keep looking
for more and more detail, and just keep kind of
digging in deeper and deeper. (piano music playing)