Window mode follows your eyes with your camera, in this browser only: no picture or position leaves your device.
Bouquet of Flowers and Fruit with Blue Ribbon
Maria van Oosterwijck (Dutch, 1630–1693)
c. 1680
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- 36 × 28.3 cm (14 1/4 × 11 1/8 in.); Framed: 49.3 × 41.3 × 6.7 cm (19 3/8 × 16 1/4 × 2 5/8 in.)
- Culture
- Netherlands
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Painting and Sculpture of Europe
- Credit line
- Rhoades Foundation and Julius Lewis Acquisition Endowment Fund; Josephine and John J. Louis Jr. Endowed Acquisition Fund; C. Harker and Mae Svoboda Rhodes Acquisition Fund; John A. Bross Fund in memory of Louise Smith Bross
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Little Ones profiles and older: it shows gentle subjects for the very young. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
This seemingly straightforward scene by Maria van Oosterwijck, one of the few known female painters in the Dutch Republic, in fact depicts a fantastical image. The 11 species of flora, accompanied by a single grasshopper and hung from a nail by a ribbon, do not all blossom in the same season. Additionally, several of these varieties are not indigenous to Northern Europe. The arrangement thus reflects the global markets in which the Dutch participated: the sweet sultan (the orange flower at upper left) would have been imported from Turkey, while the bitter orange (beneath the ribbon at center) originated in the Mediterranean. Oosterwijck was renowned for such paintings of suspended bouquets.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
