This beautifully-preserved copper by Daniel Seghers, one of Antwerp's leading seventeenth-century flower painters, is among the artist's relatively rare "pure" flower paintings. The balanced design and harmonious palette of the intimate composition eschew pictorial distraction, inviting the viewer to contemplate the luminous flowers, on which two nearly-translucent butterflies have just alit. Delicately rendered with jewel-like claritys , the blooms, about to blossom, appear almost redolent. Indeed, Seghers's friend Constantijn Huygens, Secretary to the Dutch stadholders and one of the period's leading art patrons, described Seghers's floral still lifes as appearing so life-like that "one could almost smell them."¹

Seghers likely inherited his fascination with the meticulous rendition of botanical forms from his teacher Jan Brueghel the Elder, frequently considered the greatest exponent of the still life genre. Such close examination of nature, on the part of both the artist and viewer, was understood as a stimulus to religious meditation. While the pink and white roses, striped tulip, and red crown imperial lilies were all cultivated locally in Belgium, they also possessed religious symbolism as allusions to the Virgin's purity and virtue.

In 1614, at the age of twenty-four, Seghers converted to Catholicism and entered the Jesuit Order in Mechelen as a lay brother. He took his final vows in 1625. Thereafter, as in the present painting, he signed his works both with his own name (or initials) and with a notation of his religious affiliation. With the exception of two years in Rome, Seghers spent the rest of his career working from a Jesuit monastery in Antwerp. Even so, his paintings were collects ed both by local intellectuals, including Huygens, and by monarchs across Europe, among them Prince Frederick Henry of Orange-Nassau, Queen Christina of Sweden, and Charles I of England.

¹ "In Praestantissimi Pictoris Dan. Segheri Flores," in De gedichten van Constantijn Huygens, J.A. Worp (ed.), Groningen 1894, p. 43 (14 February 1645).