AUDIO TRANSCRIPT / Looking Closely with Curator Lara Yeager-Crasselt

[saxophone softly playing]

[Lara Yeager-Crasselt] My name is Lara Yeager-Crasselt, and I’m curator and department head of European Painting and Sculpture here at the Baltimore Museum of Art. This is a painting by the Dutch artist Balthasar van der Ast, and it shows a number of natural objects displayed before the viewer on a stone ledge.

Van der Ast was very interested not so much in the abundance of objects but in the selective representation of each of them, giving them a sense of individuality, thinking about how their shadows fall on the stone ledge. The light is coming from the upper left-hand corner. He’s kept the background completely bare with a simple color, and in that way, the objects have a sense of depth and placement and space. You’re meant to study each of them and really kind of marvel at the beauty of these natural objects one by one.

There are a group of seashells from across the globe, a tulip on its side. There’s a carnation, two roses upside down in a very unusual way towards the back of the ledge. You actually see Van der Ast’s signature, which he’s also seemingly kind of carved illusionistically into the stone window ledge itself. And interspersed among these objects are insects. There’s a dragonfly resting on the tulip’s petal, there’s a bumblebee buzzing in the central background, and there’s an inch worm making its way up the stem of the carnation in the foreground.

Van der Ast’s inclusion of the various insects here, with their wings still in movement, if we imagine them not being there, it completely changes the entire still life and how we see it and interact with it. There is air, there is space, there is light, and this kind of enlivening of the still life was something that made it so enchanting for a 17th-century viewer

AUDIO TRANSCRIPT / Seashells and Colonial Exploitation

[Lara Yeager-Crasselt] The seashells represented here, on the left we have a marble cone shell, which comes from the Indo-Pacific Oceans. We have a West Indian top shell further over to the right. Behind them, a murex. And then further over, an auger shell and then also a general cone shell. So, these objects or these seashells come from East and West, and they would have all been brought back centrally to the Netherlands.

The labor involved in procuring and finding these shells was often a very dangerous, time-consuming, difficult activity. And it was typically performed in places like the islands of Indonesia by the Indigenous people who lived there and who became involved, in some cases were enslaved by the Dutch, and had to both find, dive for these shells, clean them, prepare them for export back to the Netherlands.

And this was often a history which for a long time had been hidden. The enormous amount of seashells that poured into the Netherlands through the ships, from the Dutch East and West India companies, just opened up the market.

Seashells, like flowers, were seen as God’s creation in the period that Van der Ast was working. There was a long tradition of collecting seashells that goes back to classical antiquity. And so, collectors were eager to own different varieties of shells to keep them in what we call collector’s cabinets, to study them, discuss them, compare them. And of course, they became of great interests for artists, like Balthasar van der Ast, who may have had his own collection of seashells. What we do know is that in preparation for many of these paintings, he did drawings from life studying these shells in these beautiful pen-and-ink drawings on parchment, which are very delicately rendered. And he probably would use these study drawings and then incorporate different shells into his finished paintings.

AUDIO TRANSCRIPT / Adding This Painting to the Collection

[jazz music softly playing]

[Lara Yeager-Crasselt] The BMA acquired this painting in the spring of 2023, and it is a very exciting and important addition to the collection of European art. We have only two other Dutch still lifes from this period, from much later in the 17th century, and they also represent different kind of subject matter and a different focus.

Balthasar van der Ast was one of the founding and most important Dutch still-life painters working in this period, so having his work is really a foundational representation of painting in Northern Europe from this early modern period. The painting also allows us to bring together not only the artistic interests of the period but very much so studies of botany, of natural history, collecting histories, and finally those of colonial exploits around the globe of trade, and gives us that ability to situate works, which were created so many hundreds of years ago, into a kind of discussion that is also relevant and accessible to us today.

We all, in some way, may identify with collecting seashells. It’s a pastime or activity that may be something that you’ve done when you visited the beach or traveled far and brought seashells home with you. So that tradition is something that has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years, and here we see the representation of that. Adding this painting to the European collection allows us to tell new stories and get perspectives on this rich and complicated period of European history and culture that we may not have had a chance to explore before.

Art Fund Established with Exchange Funds from Gifts of Dr. And Mrs. Edgar F. Berman, Equitable Bank, N.A., Geoffrey Gates, Sandra O. Moose, National Endowment for the Arts, Lawrence Rubin, Philip M. Stern, And Alan J. Zakon, BMA

Exhibition Guide

None Are Free Until All Are Free

Audio

Joyce J. Scott with Nivedita Raj

Additional Images