Chrysanthemums

Chrysanthemums (Chrysanthèmes) is a still life Claude Monet signed and dated in 1878. The canvas, 54.5 by 65 centimeters and number 492 in Wildenstein's catalogue, is in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. A second, very similar version of the same year is in a private collection.

What you are looking at

A great mass of chrysanthemums fills the center of the picture, rising from a squat pot wrapped in a red textile patterned with dark chevrons and a fringed edge. The flowers are the large, shaggy, many-petalled kind that were fashionable in the 1870s: mostly white and cream, with pink and mauve tips and yellow centers, each head built from a whorl of short, curling strokes. They spill out sideways to left and right far beyond the pot, so the bouquet is much wider than it is tall. Their leaves are a dark, cool green, barely more than shadow.

The background is unusual. Instead of a plain wall, Monet paints a pale gray ground scattered with small, separate sprays of flowers in blue, red and orange, like a printed wallpaper or a painted screen. Three of these sprays float around the bouquet, at upper left, upper right and right, mirroring the real flowers in miniature. Along the bottom runs a strip of blue-and-white and red patterned cloth. Monet signed at lower left and wrote the date, 1878, at lower right.

How it was painted

The petals are painted with a loaded brush in short, curved strokes, each one a single gesture, and the white is mixed with pink, lilac or cream so that no flower is quite the same. Monet lets the gray of the background show through between the blooms, which keeps the mass light. The red pot is the heaviest note, painted thickly with a crisscross of darker strokes for its pattern, and it anchors the composition low and slightly left of center.

Look at how the background sprays are handled: flatter and thinner than the real flowers, like images printed on paper. The contrast between the two kinds of flower, one painted as a solid object and one as decoration, is the picture's quiet joke. It is also a lesson in how Monet thought about pictures in general: the same subject can be rendered as something you could touch or as a flat pattern on a surface, and a painting can hold both at once. That tension, between depth and decoration, runs all the way to the late water lilies.

Japonisme in a vase

The chrysanthemum is the imperial flower of Japan, and in the 1870s it was closely linked to the fashion for Japanese art in Paris. Monet, who collected Japanese prints, chose the flower deliberately; the flat, decorative background with its floating motifs also recalls Japanese screens and textiles. Two years earlier he had painted his wife Camille in kimono in La Japonaise. His friend and patron Gustave Caillebotte, a passionate gardener, later painted chrysanthemums of his own.

Still lifes and money

1878 was a desperate year for the Monets. They left Argenteuil early in the year, their second son Michel was born in March, Camille was ill, and in the late summer the family moved to Vétheuil on the Seine, where they shared a house with the Hoschedés. Still lifes of flowers and fruit sold more readily than landscapes, and Monet painted several in these years, among them Still Life with Melon, Still Life with Apples and Grapes and later the Bouquet of Sunflowers. Our hub on Monet at Vétheuil covers the years that followed. Late in life he returned to chrysanthemums in a group of decorative panels painted around 1897, flowers seen close up and filling the canvas, an idea that leads to the water lilies.

Where to see it

The painting entered the French national collections in 1951 and is in the Musée d'Orsay, though it is not always on view. For a looser flower piece a few years later, compare Vase of Flowers in the Courtauld Gallery. More on Claude Monet.