I first saw Trompe‑l’Oeil Still Life with a Flower Garland and a Curtain (1658)—oil on panel, very shiny—on a snowy evening at the Art Institute of Chicago. I was standing at a respectable museum distance when I found myself edging closer to the blue curtain to confirm it was, in fact, paint and not cloth. The folds and creases of the “fabric” were so persuasive that my hands almost twitched to smooth them. A guard produced a strategic cough. That is the first joke.

 The second joke is the flowers. They are dazzlingly, bewilderingly wrong in a way that only an expert could pull off. You are looking at roughly twenty different blooms assembled into a garland by Adriaen van der Spelt (Dutch, 1630–1673), each one so crisp you can almost hear the chlorophyll humming. There’s a tulip—a 16th‑century import to Europe from Persia—posing as if it invented spring; a rose that looks like June; a poppy already thinking about August; and assorted irises and morning glories behaving as if plant calendars were merely suggestions. Plants, bless them, do not bloom to suit our wall art. They have months. This painting has all the months at once.

Which is rather the point. Seventeenth‑century Dutch still lifes were the Instagram of their day, minus the filters and plus a great deal of linseed oil. They said things about taste and money and the ability to obtain desirable objects out of season. A tulip in April is nice. A tulip grinning next to a July rose and a late‑summer poppy is a boast. (The technical term for this is a “learned bouquet,” which is academic for “I know my plants, and I know people who can get them.”)

Now, the curtain. It was painted by Frans van Mieris (Dutch, 1635–1681), who evidently woke one morning and decided the world needed a curtain so persuasive that sensible adults would consider touching a museum wall. Curtains actually had a practical use then: people hung real ones over paintings to keep off dust and sunlight, which works until someone forgets which way the window is. Van Mieris gives you the painted version—protection and showmanship together—and, for extra flourish, tips his hat to Parrhasius, a Greek artist said to have fooled a rival into trying to pull back a painted curtain. If you felt the urge, you’re in ancient company.

It’s worth pausing to admire the teamwork. Collaborative paintings in the Dutch Republic were uncommon, not because artists disliked each other (though some surely did) but because the art market was intensely competitive. Two names on one panel meant two careers attached to one outcome. Here it is beautifully divided: van der Spelt does nature, van Mieris does theater, and the result looks like a garden that wandered onto a stage and decided to stay.

As botany, it is nonsense of the most appealing kind. Tulips are spring sprinters (April–May). Roses blow in early summer (June–July). Poppies, once they have done their showy bit, very quickly become seed capsules with the meaningful air of late summer about them. In life, these appearances are graciously staggered to prevent everyone bottlenecking the pollinators. In paint, they arrive on cue, together, and never leave. It is seasonal time‑travel with better lighting.

The tulip, for its part, brings luggage. It traveled from Persia into European gardens in the sixteenth century, collected stories and admirers en-route, and in the Netherlands eventually helped cause a speculative fever so enthusiastic it reads like satire until you see the bills. Behind the garland are gardeners, greenhouses, catalogs, ships, and more than a few very proud people. Mastering plants, then as now, meant mastering networks. You can feel that in the picture. It’s a bouquet, yes, but also a small inventory of possibility.

There is a gentle moral folded into all this bravado. Dutch painters liked to remind viewers that nature, however carefully arranged, goes its own way. Flowers bloom, flowers fade, empires do the same; but for a moment—captured on a wooden panel—you can have April, June, and August together, forever. It is not how gardens work. It is exactly how paintings do.

And if you think we’ve grown out of this, consider the modern supermarket flower section in midwinter, or the astonishing things people do to houseplants on the internet (I once tried to persuade a fern to be happy in a north‑facing hallway; it responded by becoming a concept). We still bend the calendar where we can. We still admire the effect. We still need botany to tell us what, precisely, we’re looking at.

So: a garland by van der Spelt, a curtain by van Mieris, two artists collaborating when most didn’t, producing a picture that simultaneously invites you to pull at a painted fabric and to believe, for a pleasurable minute, that all of nature has agreed to pose at once. It hasn’t, of course. But what a lovely thought while the guard is watching.