Description
| Year of creation: | 1909 |
| Original size: | 32.7 cm x 45.4 cm |
| Painting style: | Naive art (Primitivism), Post-Impressionist period |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo |
Flowers in a Vase, 1909
A still life, not a jungle
This is one of the few still lifes on our shelf and the only one among the seventeen new
works. The background is grey-green wooden panelling with vertical boards, and an orange-brown
table top fills the lower third. On it stands a tall fluted glass vase through which dark red
stems show. In front of the vase a sprig of ivy lies flat across the table; that small stroke
breaks the strict symmetry of the bouquet and is a device Rousseau used often.
What is in the bouquet
The bouquet is assembled from clearly separated species, each painted on its own terms: two
large pink peonies at the left and below, a white dahlia at the right, white daisies with
yellow centres at the centre, white star-shaped flowers upper left and right, a red-and-yellow
striped tulip, yellow mimosa, a dark violet bloom at the upper right and a few small blue
flowers. Green fern fronds spread between them. No flower is shadowed by another; each keeps
its own outline.
Painted without depth
Rousseau did not build the bouquet with light but with contour. Every flower is a closed
shape with its own colour, set against a background that does not recede. That is why the
still life reads more as an arrangement of patterns than as a scene in space – and it is
exactly what makes it recognisably his. The same procedure, with leaves instead of flowers, is
in Rendezvous in the Forest.
The year 1909
The canvas dates from 1909, the year before the painter’s death. In these last years
Rousseau painted the large jungles and, alongside them, smaller and more saleable works: still
lifes, portraits, scenes from the edge of Paris. The flower pieces are the most sought after of
those, because there are comparatively few. Another flower canvas on our shelf is Bouquet of Flowers.
Museum and record
The painting is held by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in Buffalo, New York, under accession
number RCA1939:17. The museum’s record gives it as a 1939 acquisition of the Room of
Contemporary Art Fund, when the institution was still called the Albright-Knox Art Gallery;
the museum’s name changed later, while the acquisition line stands as the museum prints it.
It measures 32.7 x 45.4 cm.
A smaller canvas
At 32.7 x 45.4 cm this is among the smallest works on our shelf. For a still life that is
no drawback: the density of the flowers is calculated for that size, which is why a
reproduction at a larger scale reads as more decorative than the original. A comparable small
domestic canvas is The Rabbit’s Meal, and a quiet Paris subject of a different kind is The Banks of the Bièvre near Bicêtre.
Our reproduction
We make this as a hand-painted reproduction in oil on canvas, to order, in the size you
choose. Because it is hand-painted, every copy differs slightly from the last; it is not a
print. The canvas is stretched on a wooden frame and arrives ready to hang. The full range by this painter is in the Henri Rousseau gallery.
