The State Hermitage is presenting a large-scale exhibition project that brings together more than 70 paintings by Flemish artists in the still life and animal genres from the seventeenth-century heyday of art in Flanders. Of those, 45 pictures are from the collection of the State Hermitage and fifteen from the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. The works on display reflect the main stages in the evolution of the Flemish still life as an independent genre, its diversity of types, as well as the range of individual artistic manners.
At the center of attention are the paintings of Frans Snijders (1579-1657). Tracing the development of the impulse that Frans Snijders’ art gave to the still-life genre and his influence on the work of his contemporaries, pupils and followers is the most important aim of the exhibition. Also on show are paintings by his followers and pupils Paul de Vos (ca. 1596-1678) and Joannes Fijt (1611-1661). Besides, the exhibition shows works by Adriaen van Utrecht (1599–1652), Frans Ykens (1601-1693) and other well-known seventeenth-century Flemish masters of decorative painting, who absorbed the Snijders tradition and spread it far beyond the bounds of their native Antwerp.
A considerable role in the exhibition is allotted to the floral still life genre. Two grand pictures presenting in all its splendor a garden filled with tulips, roses, anemones and other blooms are the joint work of the artists Abraham Brueghel (1631-1697) and David de Coninck (1644-ca. 1701). This pair of paintings – Flowers among Architecture (Spring) and Flowers and Fruit (Summer) – have become a sort of focus for the display.
Specially for the exhibition, restoration was carried out on the panel Flowers among Architecture (Spring) and also on the large (278 × 559 cm) cartoon for a tapestry of Hunting Trophies made by the Flemish artists Abraham van Diepenbeek (1596–1675) and Pieter Boel (1622–1674).
The exhibition has been organized by the State Hermitage with the participation of the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, the Peter the Great Central Naval Museum, the Saint Petersburg branch of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Research Museum of the Russian Academy of Arts, the Art Center Moscow, and the private collection of Valeria and Konstantin Mauerhaus.
This exhibition’s curators are Mikhail Dedinkin, head of the Department of Western European Fine Art and Tatiana Kosourova, head of the Decorative and Applied Art Sector in the State Hermitage’s Department of Western European Applied Art.
The exhibition is accompanied by a scholarly catalogue.