Still Life with Flowers, a Snail and Insects

Joris Hoefnagel

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Joris Hoefnagel is one of a few artists in the sixteenth century celebrated for their incredibly accurate and beautiful studies after nature. The symmetric composition of this bouquet might give it a gloss of artifice from a modern viewpoint, but conforms to the predominant taste that lasted well into the seventeenth century. The difference in scale of some of Hoefnagel’s flowers indicates that he used individual flower studies to form his bouquet - a fact that is supported by his reuse of separate motifs in other works. This particular bouquet of flowers is a very intimate work, not just because of its size, but also because of its intended purpose. The Latin inscription on the pedestal reveals that Hoefnagel made this drawing for his mother ‘as a monument of love’.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art