Vase of Flowers

Claude Monet's Vase of Flowers, often listed as Bouquet of Flowers or Bouquet of Mallows, is a large still life of pink and white mallows painted around 1881–82. The canvas, about 100 by 82 centimeters and number 626 in Wildenstein's catalogue, is in the Courtauld Gallery in London, part of the collection formed by the textile industrialist Samuel Courtauld in the 1920s.

What you are looking at

A squat, dark blue-black vase stands on a table covered with a white cloth. From it erupts a great loose spray of flowers, wider than it is tall, spilling past the vase on every side. The blossoms are mallows, painted as small five-petalled stars in rose, crimson, mauve and white, each set down with a twist of the brush. Long stems shoot out to the left and up toward the top edge, so the bouquet has an irregular, windblown outline rather than the tidy dome of a florist's arrangement. The leaves are scarcely described at all; green appears mainly as shadow between the flowers.

The background is not a wall but a field of broken color: yellow-green and gold at the upper right, cooler green and gray at the left, as though the vase were standing in diffused daylight on a terrace. The tablecloth at the bottom is painted in short, scumbled strokes of white, violet and blue, with a shadow cast by the vase in deep blue, so the white is never quite white. Monet's signature, in red, sits at lower right.

A still life painted like a landscape

What is striking here is how little Monet changes his method for an indoor subject. The bouquet is handled exactly like the foliage in his garden pictures, as a mass of flickering touches that dissolve under light, and the background shimmers like sky. The shadows are colored, the highlights are made of pure pigment, and the whole surface is kept moving. The picture sits between conventional flower painting and the open-air work in canvases such as The Gladioli and Monet's Garden at Vétheuil, where the same flowers grow in beds instead of vases.

Notice the composition. The vase is pushed low and slightly right of center, so the spray has room to fan out into the upper left. The diagonal of the longest stems runs against the diagonal of the vase's shadow on the cloth, which keeps a potentially static subject in motion. The size is unusual too. At about a meter high, the canvas is far larger than a typical dining-room flower piece, and its scale lets the brushwork stay broad: each blossom is a stroke the size of a thumbnail, readable from across a room. Up close the bouquet falls apart into paint; from a few steps back it gathers into flowers.

Still lifes in Monet's career

Monet painted relatively few still lifes, and most of them date from the late 1870s and early 1880s, years of money trouble after he left Argenteuil. Flower pieces and fruit sold more readily than landscapes, and Paul Durand-Ruel, who resumed buying from him regularly in 1881, could place them with collectors. In those years Monet was living at Vétheuil on the Seine, where his own garden supplied the flowers; at the end of 1881 he moved to Poissy. Our hub on Monet at Vétheuil covers this period.

His other still lifes of these years include the formal Chrysanthemums of 1878, Jerusalem Artichoke Flowers of 1880 in Washington and the late-summer Bouquet of Sunflowers of 1881 in the Metropolitan Museum. Fruit pieces such as Still Life with Apples and Grapes belong to the same commercial moment. Among them the Courtauld mallows are the loosest and most painterly, and the largest.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Courtauld Gallery at Somerset House, London, a compact museum with a superb group of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist pictures. It came with Samuel Courtauld's gift of 1932, which founded the gallery's collection. Monet's Antibes hangs in the same rooms. For other collections worldwide, see where to see Monet's paintings. More on Claude Monet.