This apparently casual flower arrangement is, in fact, a precisely thought-out masterpiece. In this bouquet, Saverij has brought together flowers that bloom at different times of the year. Two sand lizards and a beetle crawl across the light-yellow stone plinth at the bottom. Two rare shells from Indonesia and West Africa bear witness to the Netherlands’ colonial past, while the precise representation of the insects indicates the emergence of a new science: entomology. As a whole, the painting symbolises the transience of life on earth.

Roelant Saverij is known to have painted twenty different flower pieces. Together with an almost identical version now in New York, ‘Flower still-life with two lizards’ is his earliest and, thereby, the earliest dated still-life from the Northern Netherlands. The bouquet is unevenly lit creating an effect of depth. The colours are bright and clear.