Offering of the Day: A Lovely Floral Still Life with Grapes and Butterflies

 Jean-François van Dael (Antwerp 1764-1840 Paris)

Floral Still Life with grapes and butterflies

Watercolor on paper

13 x 16 inches

Framed: 23 1/4 x 27 inches

Signed lower right: Vandael 1807

$24,000

Along with Redouté and the Spaendonck brothers, Jan Frans van Dael is regarded as one of the most significant flower painters of the late 18th and early 19th century. He, like his predecessors, spent his youth in the Low Countries, but eventually made a name for himself in Paris. Studying architectural draughtsmanship in Antwerp, van Dael preferred to paint, teaching himself in private and making his way to Paris to work as a decorative painter the chateaux of St Cloud, Bellevue and Chantilly. His passion, however, soon turned to flower painting. He studied botany and painted specimens from life in a similar style to his mentor Gerard van Spaendonck and the Dutch master Van Huysum. Throughout the volatile era in which he lived, van Dael received commissions from significant patrons, most notably the Empress Josephine at Malmaison, the Empress Marie-Louise, Louis XVIII and Charles X. His works were widely exhibited at the Paris Salons, in his hometown of Antwerp, as well as in Ghent, Brussels and The Hague.

In addition to his floral and fruit still lives, van Dael tried his hand at landscape paintings as well as religious and allegorically based subjects. He was also known to have painted a

portrait or two.

The works of van Dael are found in the Louvre; Chateau de Malmaison; the Chateau de Fontainebleau; the Museum Boymans-van-Beuningen, Rotterdam; the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille and the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp.