Initially primarily a motif in religious painting, over the 1500s the bouquet of flowers developed into a pictorial subject in its own right. One of the most important representatives of the new genre was Jan Brueghel the Elder. The Munich painting is based on the ‘Grand Bouquet of Flowers in a Wooden Vessel’ (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum), but shows weaknesses in the quality of execution, indicating that it is a studio work. The grounds for this attribution are most clear in one detail: Due to the lack of space the red martagon lily on the far left is squeezed between the Japanese snowball and the white lily.