Exhibition | Two Masterpieces by Jan Van Huysum
From the press release for the exhibition:
Look Closely, Can You Spot the Butterfly? Two Masterpieces by Jan Van Huysum
Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, 16 May — 8 September 2024
Jan van Huysum, Flowers in a Vase with Crown Imperial and Apple Blossom at the Top and a Statue of Flora, 1731–32 (Private Collection).
Strawberry Hill House continues its acclaimed In-Focus series in 2024–25 with displays of extraordinary objects and artworks that have a connection with its original owner, Horace Walpole (1717–1797). Featuring paintings by Jan Van Huysum, a bronze bust of Caligula, and three mysterious daggers, each of the three exhibitions will tease out the fascinating facts and hidden histories connecting these artworks to this remarkable writer, connoisseur, and collector.
Evocatively demonstrating Jan Van Huysum’s (1682–1749) gift for creating sophisticated still life compositions depicting flowers and fruits, Strawberry Hill House is delighted to present the Dutch 18th-century master’s Flowers in a Vase with Crown Imperial and Apple Blossom at the top and a Statue of Flora and Fruit and Flowers in front of a Garden Vase with an Opium Poppy and a Row of Cypresses, both from 1731–32. On loan from a private collection, the paintings will be on public display for the first time in 10 years.
Art historian Andrew Graham Dixon has described the pair as “the two most brilliant and perfectly preserved paintings by the painter,” and they have remained together ever since leaving Van Huysum’s studio. It is believed that they were conceived as pendants from the outset, one showing mostly fruits, the other flowers. The pictures are in exceptional preservation and vividly showcase Van Huysum’s desired freshness of colour and transparency. They were originally owned by the painter Jeanne Etienne Liotard (1702–1789).
Van Huysum’s work was greatly appreciated during his lifetime, and for half a century afterwards his pictures sold for unprecedented sums and were only collected by the richest collectors in Europe, among which was Horace’s father, Sir Robert Walpole (1676–1745). Although Horace Walpole did not keep any Jan Van Huysums at Strawberry Hill himself—due to their rarity, expense, and difficulty in procurement—he did possess a painting by Jacob Van Huysum, Van Huysum’s brother, who resided at Sir Robert Walpole’s house in Chelsea, as well as numerous pictures by Jean Baptiste Monnoyer (1636–1699), a French-Flemish painter who relocated to Britain in the late 17th century, and works by his son Antoine Monnoyer, (1670–1747) whose compositions were similar to Van Huysum’s but less soft and finished.
Liotard was forced to sell his pair of Van Huysums, and afterwards they were bought by the Landgraf Friedrich II of Hesse-Cassel (1720–1785), only to be appropriated by Napoleon during the wars before remerging in England, in private collections. Strawberry Hill House’s In-Focus exhibition will provide visitors with an immersive experience, inviting them to delve into the intricate details and pictorial brilliance and to celebrate Walpole’s fascination with flowers and his garden at the villa, through Van Huysum’s beautiful paintings.
Rediscovered: The Lost Bronze of Roman Emperor Caligula
6 June — 8 September 2024
Is This a Dagger I See before Me? The Collector, the Actor, and the Mystery of the Ottoman Jewelled Dagger
3 October 2024 — 10 January 2025
More information on these two exhibitions is available here»
New Book | The Garden Against Time
From Pan Macmillan:
Olivia Laing, The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise (London: Picador, 2024), 336 pages, ISBN: 978-1529066678, £20 / $28.
“A garden contains secrets, we all know that: buried elements that might put on strange growth or germinate in unexpected places. The garden that I chose had walls, but like every garden it was interconnected, wide open to the world . . .”
In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore an 18th-century walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work drew her into an exhilarating investigation of paradise and its long association with gardens. Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton’s Paradise Lost to John Clare’s enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth.
But the story of the garden doesn’t always enact larger patterns of privilege and exclusion. It’s also a place of rebel outposts and communal dreams. From the improbable queer utopia conjured by Derek Jarman on the beach at Dungeness to the fertile vision of a common Eden propagated by William Morris, new modes of living can and have been attempted amidst the flower beds, experiments that could prove vital in the coming era of climate change. The result is a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardens: not as a place to hide from the world but as a site of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden.
Olivia Laing is a widely acclaimed writer and critic. She’s the author of seven books, including The Lonely City, Funny Weather, and Everybody. Her first novel, Crudo, was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller and won the 2019 James Tait Memorial Prize. Her work has been translated into twenty-one languages, and in 2018 she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction. She lives in Suffolk.
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