Juan de Arellano

Anonymous sale ('The Property of a Gentleman'), London, Sotheby's, 10 July 2003, lot 44, for £140,000;

Where acquired by the present owner.

A.E. Pérez Sánchez, Pintura española de bodegones y floreros de 1600 a Goya, exh. cat., Madrid 1983, p. 122, no. 89, reproduced in colour (as partially signed: Arellano);

A.E. Pérez Sánchez, Pintura española de bodegones y floreros, exh. cat., Tokyo 1992, pp. 64 and 110, no. 40, reproduced in colour;

A.E. Pérez Sánchez, Juan de Arellano, exh. cat., Madrid 1998, pp. 258–59, no. 69, reproduced in colour.

Madrid, Museo del Prado, Pintura española de bodegones y floreros de 1600 a Goya, November 1983 – January 1984, no. 89;

Tokyo, National Museum of Western Art, and Nagoya, Nagoya City Art Museum, Pintura española de bodegones y floreros, 11 February – 12 April, and 21 April – 31 May 1992, no. 40;

Madrid, Fundación Caja de Madrid, Juan de Arellano: 1614–1676, 5 May – 28 June 1998, no. 69.

Rediscovered in 1983 at the time of a seminal exhibition on Spanish still life painting at the Museo del Prado, Madrid,¹ this work represents one of only a very small number of outdoor still lifes by Arellano, in which flowers and insects are depicted in their natural surroundings, expanding his identifiable repertoire of still-life compositions. Others in the group include a painting of An Urn of Flowers and Carnations in the Grounds of a Villa in a private collection, Barcelona, designed as an overdoor;² and a pair of canvases depicting wreaths of flowers in a landscape: one in a private collection, Madrid;³ the other, which is tentatively dated to the 1660s, on the US art market in 1994.⁴

Operating from a shop in front of the Convento de San Felipe el Real in Madrid, Juan de Arellano rose from modest beginnings to become the foremost floral still-life painter in seventeenth-century Spain, influenced both by Flemish and Italian artists, such as Daniel Seghers (1590–1661) and Mario Nuzzi (1603–1673), and developing his own highly distinctive style.

¹ Madrid 1983–1984, p. 112, no. 89.

² Madrid 1998, pp. 260–61, no. 70, reproduced in colour.

³ Madrid 1998, p. 68, fig. 15, reproduced in colour.

⁴ New York, Christie's, 18 May 1994, lot 72, unsold at $400,000–600,000.