Still Life with a Vase of Flowers and a Dead Frog

1634

Object data

oil on panel

support: height 40.3 cm × width 31 cm

Inscriptions

signature, date and inscription, bottom centre, on the table in the foreground: .IACOBVS.MARRELLVS.fecit.VtRECk. / .ANNO.1.6.34.

Technical notes

Support The single, vertically grained oak plank is approx. 0.7 cm thick. The reverse is bevelled on all sides. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1609. The panel could have been ready for use by 1618, but a date in or after 1628 is more likely.
Preparatory layers The single, smooth, warm, light brown ground extends up to the edges of the support at the top and on the left, and over the bottom and right edges. It contains large lead white particles and earth pigments.
Underdrawing Infrared reflectography and reflectance imaging spectroscopy (VNIR, SWIR) revealed an underdrawing in what appears to be a dry medium, consisting of parallel, straight lines delineating previous versions of the table top, as well as lines indicating the contours of flowers and leaves.
Paint layers The paint extends up to the edges of the support. The composition was built up in only one or two layers from the back to the front, with reserves for most of the flowers and leaves. The ground shows through in some thinly covered areas in the background. The bouquet was rendered carefully with convincing brushstrokes, sometimes partly extending beyond the reserves. Most of the smaller elements, such as the frog, insects, white currants, twigs and stems, were added over the background. The lighter colours are rather opaque and were applied thickly, while darker elements, such as the purplish fritillaries on the right and shadowed areas, were executed more thinly with more translucent paints. Delicate dots and lines of slightly impasted paint were used to indicate fine details on the flowers and insects. The green of the leaves consists of azurite mixed with lead tin yellow and a yellow lake pigment. Smalt was used in some of the deeper shadows in the foliage and, mixed with red lake, as a glaze on the fritillaries and the red-and-white tulip at the top.
Eva van Zuien, Nouchka De Keyser, 2022

Scientific examination and reports

technical report: E. van Zuien, RMA, 10 November 2008
paint samples: A. Wallert, RMA, nos. 176/1-3, 22 January 2009
X-radiography: RMA, nos. 1878 (1-2), 2 February 2009
paint samples: A. Wallert, RMA, nos. 176/2-3 (XRF), 25 March 2009
dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 17 December 2011
infrared reflectography: A. Wallert, RMA, 5 December 2014

Condition

Good. A small piece of the lower right corner of the panel has been repaired. The saponification of lead white has caused increased transparency of the ground and paint layers; as a result the wood grain has become disturbingly visible here and there. A distinct, wider crack pattern is apparent in dark green areas.

Conservation

E. van Zuien, 2009: complete restoration

Provenance

…; ? anonymous sale, London (Edward Foster), 7 January 1824, no. 21 (‘J. Marellus, 1634, A Flower piece, finely painted, companion piece to lot 22’), bought in;¹…; donated by Hendrik Willem Mesdag (1831-1915), The Hague, to the museum, 1883²

Object number: SK-A-772

Credit line: Gift of H.W. Mesdag, The Hague

The artist

Jacob Marrel (Frankenthal 1613/14 - Frankfurt am Main 1681)

In 1661 Jacob Marrel published Artliches und Kunstreichs Reissbüchlein with drawing examples for apprentice painters, goldsmiths and sculptors. The self-portrait it contains, which is based on an earlier drawn likeness, is dated 1635 and inscribed ‘Æ: Suæ 21’,³ so Marrel was born in 1613 or 1614. That is confirmed by his statement in 1645 that he was 31 years old. He himself gave his place of birth as Frankenthal on the title pages of several of his books of drawings of tulips.⁴ His father, who came from a Burgundian family of jewellers, was the city secretary there. After his death Marrel’s mother moved to Frankfurt in 1624. Von Sandrart says that the young Jacob then trained with Georg Flegel.

He settled in Utrecht in the early 1630s, where he became a member of the Reformed Congregation in 1632 and got engaged in 1636, but the wedding never took place. A still life of 1637 has the inscription ‘in Francofurth’,⁵ and several watercolours of 1639 are inscribed ‘J. Marrell fecit in Amsterdam’, but he was back in Utrecht in 1641, when he married Catharina Eliot, the daughter of an Antwerp silversmith. He is recorded as an art dealer in 1646. The probate inventory drawn up on the death of Catharina in 1649 lists more than 50 works by various painters which would have been his stock-in-trade, and also includes flowers and bulbs as commodities. Evidence that Marrel was in close touch with the leading Utrecht artists of the day is provided by the mention of ultramarine that he bought together with Cornelis van Poelenburch.

After his wife’s decease Marrel settled in Frankfurt for good. He acquired citizenship there in 1651 and married the widow of Matthäus Merian I, which made him the stepfather of Maria Sybilla Merian. It is generally assumed that he commuted regularly between Frankfurt and Utrecht as a dealer in the period 1659-80, and the probate inventory of 1649 suggests that he was already doing so earlier, for it lists a large number of books from Merian’s stock, including all the volumes of the Topographia Germaniæ published up to 1646. The city authorities of Frankfurt and Nuremberg gave Marrel permission to sell paintings at lotteries on several occasions between 1672 and 1680. According to a fellow citizen, he sold bad pictures and copies for high prices. Marrel died in Frankfurt in 1681.

Nothing is known about possible teachers in Utrecht. Jan Davidsz de Heem is often mentioned as one of them, but at most Marrel could have met him sporadically from 1659 on, although he did copy work of the artist.⁶ Marrel’s oeuvre mainly comprises flower pieces. He was not an innovator but always followed the fashion of the day. More than 40 of his paintings are dated. The earliest are from 1634 and were influenced by Roelant Savery, Balthasar van der Ast and Ambrosius Bosschaert II. His last dated picture is from 1681.⁷ Von Sandrart says that he taught Rudolf Werdmüller (1639-1668), as well as Johann Andreas Graff (1637-1701), who married his stepdaughter Maria Sybilla in 1664. Houbraken mentions her and Abraham Mignon (1640-1679) as pupils.

Erlend de Groot, 2022

References
J. von Sandrart, Academie der Bau-, Bild- und Mahlerey-Künste von 1675: Leben der berühmten Maler, Bildhauer und Baumeister, ed. A.R. Peltzer, Munich 1925 (ed. princ. Nuremberg 1675), pp. 220, 345-46; A. Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, III, Amsterdam 1721, pp. 82-83, 220-21; A.C. de Kruyff, ‘Iets over den schilder Jacob Marrell’, Oud Holland 10 (1892), pp. 57-60; A. Bredius, Künstler-Inventare, I, The Hague 1915, pp. 112-19; Bredius and Zülch in U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, XXIV, Leipzig 1930, p. 137; W.K. Zülch, Frankfurter Künstler, 1223-1700, Frankfurt 1935, pp. 537-40; G. Bott, ‘Stilleben des 17. Jahrhunderts: Jacob Marrell’, Kunst in Hessen und am Mittelrhein 6 (1966), pp. 84-117; J.G.C.A. Briels, Vlaamse schilders en de dageraad van Hollands Gouden Eeuw 1585-1630, Antwerp 1997, p. 357; G. Bott, Die Stillebenmaler Soreau, Binoit, Codino und Marrell in Hanau und Frankfurt: 1600-1650, Hanau 2001, pp. 127-49, 223-43; A. van der Willigen and F.G. Meijer, A Dictionary of Dutch and Flemish Still-Life Painters Working in Oils, 1525-1725, Leiden 2003, pp. 138-39; Kasten in Saur Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, LXXXVII, Munich/Leipzig 2015, p. 293

Entry

This and at least four other paintings are Jacob Marrel’s earliest dated works.⁸ The present one is clearly indebted to Ambrosius Bosschaert II, who was active in Utrecht from around 1627.⁹ The latter’s Bouquet in a Glass Vase of 1632 contains many of the same flowers arranged in much the same way.¹⁰ The light background and powerful chiaroscuro, on the other hand, are derived from the repertoire of Bosschaert’s uncle Balthasar van der Ast.

In addition to the obvious borrowings the picture contains several details that were innovative, for Utrecht still lifes at least. One typically Utrecht motif, for instance, is the frog, which was introduced in the early seventeenth century by Ambrosius Bosschaert I, Roelant Savery, Balthasar van der Ast and other members of the Bosschaert family.¹¹ It is usually assumed that Marrel’s variation on the theme, a dead frog lying on its back, was adopted from a work by Ambrosius Bosschaert II of the small amphibian alone.¹² However, Segal dated that to 1635-39, in other words later than the Rijksmuseum painting.¹³ It is far more likely that Marrel took the frog from the Archetypa, a collection of prints of flowers, plants, insects and other creatures engraved by Jacob Hoefnagel after designs by his father Joris Hoefnagel.¹⁴ The series was published in Frankfurt in 1592 and was a major source of inspiration for Marrel’s teacher Georg Flegel, among others. Marrel must have known it, and he may also have borrowed the fanciful vase supported on three or four bird’s feet from prints. There is an obvious similarity to a bouquet engraved in 1604 by Johann Theodor de Bry after Jacob Kempener, which was also issued in Frankfurt.¹⁵

The composition of Marrel’s still life is dominated by seven types of large and smaller flowers that catch the most light. At the top there are a couple of tulips; the middle section includes pink sweet briars with a red anemone below, flanked by yellow wallflowers and a half-open marigold; at the bottom there are a Province rose, an unidentified flower and a tulip. Between them, partly in shadow, are rose hips, cuckoobellflowers, bellflowers, forget-me-nots and fritillaries. They are the temporary homes of various insects. Lying on the table on the left is a small bunch of white currants with a caterpillar crawling beside it. Although the individual objects are quite highly worked up, some details betray the hand of a master who is still hesitant. The structure of the red-and-white tulip at the top is unclear, there are stalks without flowers here and there, and the leaf at top left does not continue downwards. Moreover, the fall of light on the objects is not always logical: the illuminated middle flower of the sweet briar is partly hidden behind a leaf that is in shadow.

On the evidence of the matching sizes and largely reversed compositions with identical table tops Meijer has suggested that Still Life with a Vase of Flowers and a Dead Frog may have been intended to form a pair with Marrel’s Vase of Flowers in Oxford, which is also dated 1634.¹⁶ An added argument for this can be found in a sale catalogue in London from 1824, in which two flower still lifes of 1634 by Marrel were described as pendants.¹⁷ Since no other works from that year are possible candidates, these were very probably the paintings that are now in Amsterdam and Oxford, which went to different buyers at the auction. It can hardly be a coincidence that Marrel also took inspiration for the Oxford picture from the prints of Jacob Hoefnagel. The stag beetle, which is the counterpart of the frog in the Rijksmuseum panel, is a perfect match with the one in the Archetypa series.¹⁸

Erlend de Groot, 2022

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

Literature

I. Bergström, Dutch Still-Life Painting in the Seventeenth Century, London 1956, p. 83; G. Bott, ‘Stilleben des 17. Jahrhunderts: Jacob Marrell’, Kunst in Hessen und am Mittelrhein 6 (1966), pp. 84-117, esp. p. 100, no. 2; L.J. Bol, Holländische Maler des 17. Jahrhunderts nahe den grossen Meistern: Landschaften und Stilleben, Braunschweig 1969, pp. 41, 320; L.J. Bol, ‘Goede onbekenden’: Hedendaagse herkenning en waardering van verscholen, voorbijgezien en onderschat talent, Utrecht 1982, pp. 65-68; E. Gemar-Koeltzsch, Holländische Stillebenmaler im 17. Jahrhundert, III, Lingen 1995, p. 630; G. Bott, Die Stillebenmaler Soreau, Binoit, Codino und Marrell in Hanau und Frankfurt: 1600-1650, Hanau 2001, pp. 140-43, 223; F.G. Meijer, The Collection of Dutch and Flemish Still-Life Paintings Bequeathed by Daisy Linda Ward, coll. cat. Oxford (Ashmolean Museum) 2003, pp. 248-49

Collection catalogues

1887, p. 105, no. 897; 1903, p. 169, no. 1522; 1960, p. 189, no. 1522; 1976, p. 368, no. A 772

Citation

Erlend de Groot, 2022, 'Jacob Marrel, Still Life with a Vase of Flowers and a Dead Frog, 1634', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.9010

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