HENRIETTA GEERTRUIDA KNIP (1783-1842)

VASE OF TULIPS, BUNCHES OF HYACINTHS, PRIMULA AND PANSIES, A BASKET OF STRAWBERRIES, AND TWO BIRDS' NESTS
Signed l.r. Henrietta G Knip 1814
Watercolour heightened with bodycolour
78 x 67 cm
 
PROVENANCE:
Anonymous sale, Christie's, Paris, 16.12.2005, Lot 220;
Anonymous sale, Sotheby's, London, 05.07.2006, Lot 179A;
Private collection, U.K.
 
 
 
 
Henrietta Knip, sometimes spelled Henriëtte, was born in Tilburg, in the Netherlands, the daughter of the painter Nicolaas Frederik Knip (1741-1808). Nicolaas had begun his career as a painter of wallpapers and signboards, before turning to still life paintings in later life. After her father went blind, Henrietta followed lessons from her older brother, Joseph August Knip (1777-1847), who would later become Drawing Master to Napoleon III and establish a successful practice as a landscape painter in Rome. In 1802, Henrietta followed him to Paris, where she took lessons from the flower painter Gerard van Spaendonck (1746-1822) at the Jardin des Plantes, a leading practicioner in the genre and the man who taught the master of the botanical watercolour of the period, Pierre-Joseph Redouté (1759-1840). 
 
Henrietta in turn became a commercially successful artist, spending her summers in Haarlem painting the flowers of the various flower companies, and she spent winters in Amsterdam teaching other women to paint in a similar fashion. In c.1819 she went back again to Paris to take lessons from the artist Jan Frans van Dael (1764-1840), and made her debut at the Parisian Salon in that year, later exhibiting between 1825-27. When her brother began to go blind as their father had, she was able to support his family as well as herself, having chosen never to marry.