Van Huysum, Vase with Flowers

so we are at Dulwich picture gallery in London and we are standing in front of Yan Van hise UM's vase with flowers from about 1720 it's quite a vase it's quite a lot of flowers that we've got here yes bombastic colors spilling out overflowing isn't it it's not a neat flower arrangement that your grandmother might have slaved over is it little sprigs going off every which way and flowers leaning and and lots of contrast between kind of the bright white and light coloured flowers and then these really deep shadowed kind of darker colored flowers I'm just 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 leaves if I leave here with a bee on it and there's a a raindrop and you look at the range of its magnifying tiny lines of the leaf underneath it you've got lady birds butterflies or just the activity and the velvety velvety texture you feel on that tulip you do feel like if you touched it it would feel like a real tulip and imagining how he was taking it must have been to paint that with these tiny tiny little brushes yeah we've been to here yeah mustard in just a few moments interesting as well because although it's just flowers there's definitely something else going on 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 you can follow this idea of the life cycle because there are eggs and 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 video looks like he's running around the Meccans going on from that way so we have like birth and then beginning of youth and looking at all the arrangement of flowers they're not all in full bloom so some are budding some are spring coming to life some are in stick form like this big red chrysanthemums or whatever it is in the middle there and then further away the ones in the back in the shade are in the shadow at the sunset of life the leaves are falling off they're browning yeah I said it does seem to represent the cycle maybe it's just me but my eye does keep coming back to that nest and after death that cycle renews itself and starts again with the eggs so you've got the dead twigs and then the birth and like you were saying thinking about the flowers I don't know if all these would necessarily be in bloom at the same time in the 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 and the detail you just if you have 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 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 as ever