Description
| Year of Creation: | 1910 |
| Original size: | 49.5 cm x 61 cm |
| Paint style: | Naive art (Primitivism), Post-Impressionist period |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | Tate Gallery, London |
Bouquet of Flowers, 1910
Bouquet of Flowers is the only still life on our Rousseau shelf and one of his last works. The 1910 canvas belongs to the Tate Gallery in London and measures 49.5 x 61 cm. It was painted in the year of the painter’s death.
Flowers painted like a jungle
A dense bouquet stands in a vase, made up of blooms of different species that do not flower together in nature. Rousseau painted every flower separately and with the same sharpness, including those at the back, so the bouquet has no depth and opens out as a plane. Anyone who knows his forests will recognise the procedure at once: this is the same construction as in the jungle, only gathered into a vase on a table. That is why a still life by him does not read as an exercise from a painting school but as one more assembled world. A related quiet subject without figures is Meadowland. The background is dark and even, with no window and no room to look past the bouquet.
The last year
Rousseau died on 2 September 1910, a few months after showing The Dream at the Salon des Indépendants. He painted still lifes throughout his career, but they stayed in the shadow of the jungles; today they are valued precisely because they show his procedure on a subject that needs no exotic material. The work has been in the Tate collection since 1926, an early acquisition of a Rousseau outside France. The same quiet register is in The Banks of the Bièvre near Bicêtre. The shelf now holds a second Rousseau still life, Flowers in a Vase, painted in 1909.
The hand-painted reproduction
Hand-painted oil execution is prepared in your chosen size, in oil on canvas, in the size you choose. The painter works from the original; in this motif the even sharpness of every flower is the point, so the hand of the painter is more visible here than in the large scenes. The canvas arrives stretched on a wooden stretcher frame and ready to hang, without an added frame. The full range is in the Henri Rousseau gallery, and a related Paris landscape subject is Jardin du Luxembourg.
- Motif: a dense bouquet in a vase against a dark ground
- Technique: oil on canvas, hand-painted
- Sizes: from 50 x 61 cm to 150 x 180 cm
- Point of interest: the only still life on this shelf and one of the last works, painted in the year of the painter’s death
