Abraham Mignon

Abraham Mignon was a descendant of Walloons - French-speaking Calvinists who emigrated to Frankfurt to avoid persecution by the Spanish rulers of the Southern Netherlands. He trained in Frankfurt with the flower painter and art- and tulip-dealer Jacob Marrell, following Marrell to Utrecht in the mid-1660s. From 1669 to 1672 Mignon worked in the studio of Jan Davidsz. de Heem, one of the finest and most innovative flower painters of the century.
This painting by Abraham Mignon dates from after 1672, the year that de Heem returned to his native Antwerp. Mignon was free to flourish in Utrecht, producing some of the most spectacular flower pieces of his career. This work reflects Mignon’s extraordinary balance of energy and delicate observation.
The flowers are set against a dark background, giving them maximum drama. The poppies are shown at different stages of growth, from a tight, silky bud to one unfurled in all its glory, giving a sense of time passing. The graceful ears of wheat, golden in the oblique light, are a favourite motif of Mignon. A sense of movement is implied by the moth and butterfly which have just landed on the most fragile of the flowers, and by the snails and beetles which cling to the stone ledge. Mignon was a Deacon in the French Calvinist church and his seventeenth century audience would have understood this still life as a celebration of the glories of Creation.
The bouquet’s abundance is barely contained within the space. A peony and a snowball flop forward over the stone ledge, so close they almost seem within the viewer’s touch. Mignon’s attention to detail is acute. The ants on the white rose are provided - astonishingly - with their own shadows. Only the fiercest gaze will discover the spider’s web, complete with a trapped insect or petal, which trails across the love-in-a-mist. We can enjoy these details thanks to the exceptionally fine condition of the painting, 350 years after it was made.
Gymnopedie No 1 by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. creativecommon...
Source: incompetech.com...
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