1625
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
De Poolse Muts is a 1625 by Balthasar van der Ast, a Baroque work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a single pink carnation on a plain sheet of paper, its petals drawn with tiny, careful lines. This isn’t just a pretty flower—it’s a practice sketch. Van der Ast used these studies to build bigger, fancier bouquets later. He even wrote “The Polish Cap” on the sheet, like a label in a garden notebook, hinting the flower came from far away. If you like this quiet, exact way of painting, look up *chiaroscuro*—how artists use light and shadow to make simple things feel real.
Still-life painting began in the Northern Netherlands (present-day Holland) around the turn of the 1600s. Still-life painter Balthasar van der Ast made this precise botanical study of a pink carnation as a reference that he could add later to a painting of an elaborate bouquet of flowers. Van der Ast inscribed the name “The Polish Cap,” on the sheet to suggest that the flower came from foreign lands.
According to Christian legend, carnations appeared when the Virgin Mary shed tears as Jesus carried the cross, thus the flower’s traditional association with Mother’s Day.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Balthasar van der Ast (Middelburg, 1593/94 – Delft, 7 March 1657) was a Dutch Golden Age painter who specialized in still lifes of flowers and fruit, as well as painting a number of remarkable shell still lifes; he is…
See the richer artist page
