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The last of this name, however, Jan van Huysum, belongs to the next century. Maria van Oosterwyck and Rachel Ruysch disputed honors with the above named and are still famous for their talents. The former was a daughter of a preacher of the reformed religion. She was born at Nootdorp, near Delft, in 1630.
At the lower end of the room is a very large and magnificent fruit-and flower-piece by Jan van Huysum of Amsterdam. On each side of the dais are grand entrances from the main hall of the 'new house, but the floor is broken up at this end of the salon, probably by rats, and rather than risk a fall we returned by the kitchen passage.
The artist had dipped many a time into the purse of the rich craftsman. Some time before the rebellion of the men of Ghent, Van Huysum, grown rich himself, had secretly carved for his friend a wall-decoration in ebony, representing the chief scenes in the life of Van Artevelde, that brewer of Ghent who, for a brief hour, was King of Flanders.
There are two pictures by Van Huysum, the great flower-painter, who was born at a time when Holland was possessed with a mad love of flowers and cultivated the most beautiful flowers in Europe. He celebrated this passion with his brush and created it afresh in his pictures.
He admired not only the decoration, the gilding, the carving, in the most expensive Pompadour style, as it is called, and the magnificent brocades, all of which any enriched tradesman could have procured for money; but he also noted such treasures as only princes can select and find, can pay for and give away; two pictures by Greuze, two by Watteau, two heads by Vandyck, two landscapes by Ruysdael, and two by le Guaspre, a Rembrandt, a Holbein, a Murillo, and a Titian, two paintings, by Teniers, and a pair by Metzu, a Van Huysum, and an Abraham Mignon in short, two hundred thousand francs' worth of pictures superbly framed.
The parlor, whose walls were entirely panelled with this carving, which Van Huysum, out of regard for the martyr's memory, came to Douai to frame in wood painted in lapis-lazuli with threads of gold, is therefore the most complete work of this master, whose least carvings now sell for nearly their weight in gold.
And then these finds served as so many springs which, turned on by a question, played off an essay on Jean Goujon, Michel Columb, Germain Pilon, Boulle, Van Huysum, and Boucher, the great native painter of Le Berry; on Clodion, the carver of wood, on Venetian mirrors, on Brustolone, an Italian tenor who was the Michael-Angelo of boxwood and holm oak; on the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, on the glazes of Bernard de Palissy, the enamels of Petitot, the engravings of Albrecht Durer whom she called Dur; on illuminations on vellum, on Gothic architecture, early decorated, flamboyant and pure enough to turn an old man's brain and fire a young man with enthusiasm.
The daughter of a distinguished professor of anatomy, she was born at Amsterdam in 1664. She was for a time a pupil of William van Aelst, but soon studied from nature alone. Some art critics esteem her works superior to those of De Heem and Van Huysum.
His father, Justus Van Huysum, who dealt in pictures, was himself a middling painter in most kinds of painting.
Besides the elder and younger De Heem and Maria Von Oesterwyck mentioned at page 258, Jan Van Huysum, 1682-1749, was great in flower painting, choosing flowers rather than fruit for his brush. If De Heem has been called the Titian, Van Huysum has been defined as the Correggio, of flowers and fruit.
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