Still Life with Carnations with a Butterfly, a Caterpillar and Beetle

This composition with a tight frame, wonderfully balanced, represents a still life with carnations, with shades of white and red, through pink, attesting to the place of Binoit as one of the major artists of the first generation of German still life painters after Georg Flegel, founder of the School of Still Life Paintings in Hanau,  near Frankfurt, where Binoit was a pupil and lived. The explosion of brilliant colors is manifested through these carnations deposited in a simple Berkemeier glass vase, whose stems remain visible through the tinted glass, testifying to the confidence acquired by Binoit after 1615. The treatment of the flowers is particularly delicate in this painting, and the pigments, especially the reds and whites, have been preserved without losing their luster. The impressive kite lucan, whose representation in painting dates back to Albrecht Dürer, seems to emphasize the Germanic character of this German still life, which Binoit seemed to have understood would make his fame.

Binoit's earliest still lifes – the oldest known composition to date dating from 1611 – testify to his knowledge of the works of Jan Brueghel in Antwerp and Ambrosius Bosschaert in Middelburg, as well as the flower paintings of Georg Flegel. In Binoit's works, a profusion of flowers emerges from vases, most often porcelain or earthenware. In later works, from 1615, his compositions became simpler, in glass vases, but usually integrated into a larger and more complex still life composition. They are most often placed in the left part, accompanied by bowls filled with fruit, arranged on an entablature . With this simpler composition, Binoit shows greater maturity and asserts his talent, proving that his success is not based on a painting of profusion.

Born in Cologne, the son of Jacques Binoit de Tournai, Peter Binoit began his apprenticeship in the studio of Daniel Soreau (1554-1619). He trained alongside another still life painter, Sebastian Stoskopff, as well as with his master's twins, the painters Peter and Isaac Soreau. Binoit worked in Frankfurt around 1620 and returned to Hanau in 1627, when he married Daniel Soreau's niece, and remained for the rest of his life. Georg Flegel and his pupil Gottfried von Wedig were the first German still life painters of the first half of the seventeenth century, before the second generation of painters, influenced by Jan Davidsz. de Heem, did not arrive after 1650.