Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Jacob Rootius
Dutch; 17th-century
Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum
53%
Flowers in a Vase. 1674. Oil on canvas
An unremarkable but, for the most part, unimpeachable floral still life. It gets (but then squanders) bonus points for its trompe l'oeil elements. The bouquet is set within a wall nook that's identical with the picture plane, and in a few instances the flowers jut out beyond the nook's threshold (past the picture plane, that is) and into the apparent space of the viewer. However, nothing about the rendering or the configuration of the bouquet itself — which is pretty but perhaps too precisely delineated, as are many Dutch florals from this period — interacts with the trompe l'oeil mechanism. The seeming indifference of the arrangement of flowers to the coy framing device that surrounds them gives it all the effect of a trick more than a deliberate artistic strategy. (TFS, 2026)