_Jan van Os_ (Dutch: 1744-1808).
Born at Middelharnis, a most distinguished flower-painter in
the manner of Van Huysum. He also painted marine pieces and
wrote poetry. His wife drew portraits in chalk, and his two
sons were painters.
Prominent amongst the flowers is the red cockscomb. A picture by the
most distinguished flower-painter of his time, and characteristic, in
an interesting particular, of Dutch pictures of this kind generally.
"If the reader has any familiarity with the galleries of painting
in the great cities of Europe, he cannot but retain a clear, though
somewhat monotonously calm, impression of the character of those
polished flower-pieces, or still-life pieces, which occupy subordinate
corners, and invite to moments of repose, or frivolity, the attention
and imagination which have been wearied in admiring the attitudes of
heroism, and sympathising with the sentiments of piety. Recalling to
his memory the brightest examples of these ... he will find that all
the older ones agree--if flower-pieces--in a certain courtliness and
formality of arrangement, implying that the highest honours which
flowers can attain are in being wreathed into grace of garlands, or
assembled in variegation of bouquets, for the decoration of beauty, or
flattery of _noblesse_. If fruit or still-life pieces, they agree no
less distinctly in directness of reference to the supreme hour when the
destiny of dignified fruit is to be accomplished in a royal dessert;
and the furred and feathered life of hill and forest may bear witness
to the Wisdom of Providence by its extinction for the kitchen dresser.
Irrespectively of these ornamental virtues, and culinary utilities, the
painter never seems to perceive any conditions of beauty in the things
themselves, which would make them worth regard for their own sake:
nor, even in these appointed functions, are they ever supposed to be
worth painting, unless the pleasures they procure be distinguished as
those of the most exalted society" (_Notes on Prout and Hunt_, pp. 10,
11, where Ruskin goes on to contrast with this Dutch ideal the simple
pleasure in the flowers and fruits for their own sake which marks W.
Hunt's still-life drawings).
Observe, as further characteristic of Dutch fruit-pieces, the
butterfly, the fly, and the earwig: "There was a further _tour de
force_ demanded of the Dutch workman, without which all his happiest
preceding achievements would have been unacknowledged. Not only a
dew-drop, but, in some depth of bell or cranny of leaf, a bee, or a
fly, was necessary for the complete satisfaction of the connoisseur. In
the articulation of the fly's legs, or neurology of the bee's wings,
the genius of painting was supposed to signify her accepted disciples;
and their work went forth to the European world, thenceforward, without
question, as worthy of its age and country. But, without recognising
in myself, or desiring to encourage in my scholars, any unreasonable
dislike or dread of the lower orders of living creatures, I trust
that the reader will feel with me that none of Mr. Hunt's peaches or
plums would be made daintier by the detection on them of even the most
cunningly latent wasp, or cautiously rampant caterpillar; and will
accept, without so much opposition as it met with forty years ago, my
then first promulgated, but steadily since repeated assertion, that the
'modern painter' had in these matters less vanity than the ancient one,
and better taste" (_ib._ pp. 14, 15).