Flowers in a Blue Vase
| Support Type: | Wood Panel |
| Paint Type: | Oil Paint |
| Current Location: | Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
| Location History: | The painting was first owned by the Comte de Bois-Aime in Marseille. It then passed to his nephew, M. de Loche, who kept it near Grenoble until around 1903–1904, when he sold it through a dealer named Fenaglio to a buyer named Trevroz. Trevroz owned it in Paris from that point on. Eventually the Paris dealer Alfred Daber had it, and in 1954 he sold it for just over $10,000 to the dealer Paul Rosenberg. Rosenberg kept it in his New York gallery for a couple of years before selling it in 1956 for $15,000 to Mr. and Mrs. Werner E. Josten. That same year, the Jostens donated the painting to the Metropolitan Museum, which is how it entered the Met’s collection. |
“Flowers in a Blue Vase” is the creation of Adolphe Monticelli, who was a French pre-Impressionist painter, particularly known for the thickly textured use of paints. Monticelli was particularly inspired by the works of Eugene Delacroix, shaping the way he painted later. “Flowers in a Blue Vase” is a still life, painted sometime between 1879 and 1883. It belongs to a group of flower paintings Monticelli made during those years. This was also a period when this kind of work earned him some of his strongest praise. This painting is marked by the application of thick, heavily worked paint and rich, layered colors rather than smooth, careful brushwork. Two well-known painters admired his work closely. Paul Cezanne, who was friends with Monticelli and painted alongside him in southern France in the early 1880s, was drawn to his style. Similarly, Vincent van Gogh also highly admired his work. In fact, Van Gogh praised Monticelli directly, writing in a letter to his brother that Monticelli used a simple bunch of flowers as a reason to bring together his richest and most balanced range of colors on one single panel. Monticelli was also compared to Delacroix by Van Gogh. “Flowers in a Blue Vase” remains one of his most celebrated works, featuring the application of rich colours and producing the appearance of a textured surface. Artistic elements like these made his works unique.