Large 17th Century Flemish Still Life Of Flowers Daniel Seghers (1590-1661)

Following the death of his father Pieter Seghers', Daniel Seghers' was raised in Holland as a Calvinist by his mother. He discovered painting and is cited as a pupil of Jan Brueghel the Elder (nicknamed 'Velvet' Brueghel) in Antwerp. He re-converted to Catholicism and became a guild master in 1611 before entering the Jesuit Order as a novice in Mechelen in 1614. He spent time in Brussels and a year in Rome. He worked for a number of royal patrons. His pupils were P. van Thielen, O. Elliger, N. Verendael, F. Ykeus, J. van Son, H. Galle, J.G. Gillemans, C. Luckx and J. Davidsz. de Heem. He painted the floral motifs in works by his friend Rubens, and in those of Erasmus Quellinus, Van Thulden, Cornelis Schut and Abraham van Diepenbeeck. He travelled to Ghent for health reasons in the winter of 1660 and died upon his return to Antwerp.

For Seghers' still-lifes, genre scenes (often with religious themes, such as the Vision of St Francis or the Holy Family) or, more frequently, images of saints in tondo form ( St Ignatius or even the Christ of Sorrows) were pretexts for the depiction of decorative flower garlands, executed in the minutely detailed, enamelled style of the Flemish 17th century. Seghers' flower garlands are purely decorative, generally framing a central image by another artist, but are saved from anonymity by his evident depth of botanical knowledge and imaginative compositional sense. The resulting works were clearly conceived as a unified whole, with the central images often painted in grisaille or dark tones, in deliberate contrast to Seghers' varied, delicate palette of whites and carmines complementing the more sober greens of the foliage. Lilies, roses and columbines are frequently intertwined with brambles, berries and thistles. Two of the finest examples are to be seen at the Mauritshuis in The Hague ( Garland of Flowers with the Virgin and Child (1645), with a central motif by Bosschaert) and at the Capodimonte Museum in Naples ( Garland of Flowers surrounding an image of the Virgin). More conventional flower pieces also feature in Seghers' work, albeit rarely; the 1643 painting of a vase of flowers in the Dresden Gemäldegalerie is a good example. At its most sophisticated, Seghers' work touches on the Baroque, for example in the 1643 Garland Surrounding a Bust of St Ignatius Loyola in the city museum of Antwerp. The genre enjoyed considerable success throughout Europe, spawning numerous imitators, from whom Seghers' work is distinguished by its minute observation and refined sense of colour.

Seghers' work featured in In the Light of Rubens. Baroque Painters of the Southern Netherlands ( Dans la Lumière de Rubens: Peintres Baroques des Pays-Bas du Sud) at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Valenciennes in 2000, an exhibition highlighting the work of the talented Flemish painters so often eclipsed by their illustrious contemporaries Rubens, Van Dyck and Jordaens.