Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

EXHIBITIONS HUON MALLALIEU DUTCH FLOWERS Compton Verney to 15th January PEASANTS AND PROVERBS: PIETER BRUEGHEL THE YOUNGER Barber Institute, Birmingham, to 22nd January

Connoisseurs of 17th-century Flemish and Dutch painting are well catered for in the Midlands this autumn. These comparatively small, well-focused exhibitions can be enjoyed together or severally, being just 30 miles apart.

There is a closer connection between the two, in that Dr Amy Orrock, senior curator at Compton Verney, is an eminent authority on the Bruegel dynasty, with and without the h.

The Dutch flower show is a travelling exhibition of nine splendid examples from the National Gallery, augmented by another from a private collection. They trace the first flowering (sorry) of the genre in the 17th century and brief Indian summer in the later 18th.

Generations of art historians have argued about the meaning of floral still lifes. Some seek morals and meanings in them; others see only painters demonstrating their skills. In his major book on painting, the 17th-century Dutch

Pieter Brueghel the Younger’s The Peasant Wedding (1620s)

Golden Age artist Samuel van Hoogstraten dismissed all still lifes as things that should not be made by a master ‘other than as a delight or in play’ – so not serious art.

In 1950, the art historian Van Gelder wrote that ‘their main preoccupation was that of deceiving the eye by the skill of the hand’, although he conceded that the allegorical significance of flowers should be considered. However, many others have held that vanitas and memento mori messages are the point, since the brief lives of flowers illustrate them so well.

As usual, the truth is probably in between, and the genre was the product of politics and economics. These works were produced for the new bourgeois market for secular paintings in the booming, Protestant Dutch Republic.

Tulip mania may have played a part, but when that crashed in the mid-1630s, there was still a more general interest in botany. Tulips were anyway good to paint.

The earliest work, Flowers in a Wan-Li Vase (1609-10), by the elder Ambrosius Bosschaert, is undoubtedly intended to show wealth and exoticism, while the 18th-century examples, even by Jan van Huysum, are more flowers for their own sake.

As the title Peasants and Proverbs implies, the Brueghel show is more about meanings. The peasant genre invented by the elder Pieter Bruegel (sic) and turned into an industry by his son (1564-1638) was often full of allusions to a treasury of Flemish proverbs.

The show derives from the Barber’s own Two Peasants Binding Firewood, which can be read as Greed and Lechery stealing the faggot. For comparison, there are four other versions and works by contemporaries on similar themes. The opportunity to look at the younger Brueghel’s work so closely allows us to see that he was a master of detail. He shouldn’t be dismissed as just a derivative hack, copying his father.

THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON Left: Flowers in a Vase, Paulus Theodorus van Brussel, c 1789. Right: Flowers in a Vase, Rachel Ruysch, c 1865