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CORNELIS VANSPAENDONCK
Dutch, 1756-1840
Still Life of Flowers,
1793
Oil on canvas. 31 1/4 x 25 in. (79 x 63 cm)
Bequest of David B. Goodstein, Class of 1954. 86.30.8
Cornelis van Spaendonck was born in the Dutch city of Tilburg, but by
the age of seventeen he had followed his older brother Gerardus, also a
gifted still life artist, to Paris, where they both enjoyed long and successful
careers. Cornelis, for example, was director of the great Sèvres
porcelain works.
The three Dutch still-life paintings discussed in this handbook make an
interesting comparison. The intense realism and careful documentation of
the work by Otto Marseus van Schrieck, with its monumental thistle and minute
melodrama of lizard and grasshopper, is in some ways close to the moral
urgency--the vanity of all human wealth and pretension--that we feel in
David Bailly's painting, where the man who commissioned the painting has
had himself portrayed as merely a miniature in the hands of a servant. The
van Spaendonck from the following century shares the technical virtuosity
and finish of the other two earlier works but is very different from them
in its lush cornucopia of flowers spilling over the canvas. Although there
may be some symbolism, for example, in the echo of the poppy on the left,
the symbol of sleep, in the sleeping figures in relief on the right, the
dominant feeling here is enjoyment of nature's generosity and the artist's
skill.
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