Jerusalem Artichoke Flowers

What you are looking at

A tall, loose bunch of small yellow flowers rises from a pale cylindrical vase standing on a round table, ringed at its base by a wreath of dark leaves and fruit, their stems and long pointed leaves fanning out across a canvas that is taller than it is wide. Each flower is a little sunburst: a ring of yellow petals around a darker center, a miniature sunflower. The arrangement has none of the stiffness of a florist's bouquet. It looks like an armful of stems pulled from the edge of a field and pushed into water.

The plant is the Jerusalem artichoke, Helianthus tuberosus, a relative of the sunflower grown in France for its edible tubers, the topinambour. Claude Monet painted the flowers in 1880 at Vétheuil, on the Seine. The canvas, 99.6 by 73 centimeters, is signed and dated in red at lower right and is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Looking closely

Monet gives the yellow flowers almost no modeling. Each is made with a handful of quick, radiating strokes, sometimes with a single darker touch at the heart. Their brightness comes from contrast with the greens around them and with the background, not from any careful shading. Up close, many of them are barely more than a blot of yellow; at a normal viewing distance they resolve into flowers, turned at different angles, some catching the light and some in shadow. It is the same optical trick Monet used for crowds and foliage in his landscapes, applied here to a single bunch of stems.

The leaves are the real drawing in the picture. Long, narrow and pointed, they are laid in with single sweeping strokes that follow their curve, in several greens from yellowish to dark blue-green. Where they cross they create a lattice that holds the flowers in place. Watch how the bouquet grows toward the top of the canvas and spreads outward, giving the composition a vertical lift that suits the plant's natural height; Jerusalem artichokes can grow taller than a person.

There is also a choice of subject worth noticing. Monet could have painted roses or peonies, the expensive flowers of the conventional still life. Instead he picked a common kitchen-garden plant, the kind that grows along fences and field edges. The painting finds beauty in the ordinary, as his landscapes did.

A hard year at Vétheuil

The date matters. Monet's first wife, Camille, had died at Vétheuil in September 1879 after a long illness; he painted her on her deathbed in a picture of startling directness, Camille Monet on Her Deathbed. That winter the Seine froze and then broke up in great sheets of ice, which he painted repeatedly, as in The Breakup of the Ice at Lavacourt.

He was also short of money, sharing a house with Alice Hoschedé and her children, and 1880 brought decisions about his career: he submitted to the official Salon again that year and held a one-man show at the gallery of the magazine La Vie Moderne. Flower pieces sold more readily than landscapes, and Monet painted a striking number of them at Vétheuil between 1880 and 1882. This one has a companion of sorts in the Met's Bouquet of Sunflowers (1881), a picture of the plant's more famous cousin at almost the same scale.

What does it mean?

There is no evidence that Monet meant a symbolic reading, and the painting does not need one. But it is hard to ignore the context: a painter in mourning, in a difficult year, turning to something growing and bright from his own garden. The vitality of the brushwork, quick and confident, contrasts with the quiet greys of the ice pictures painted only months before. Whether that contrast was felt by Monet or is simply our reading, the painting is one of the most cheerful objects he made in a bleak period, and it was also, plainly, a picture made to sell.

Art historians often treat these Vétheuil flower paintings as a bridge in Monet's work. Indoors, close up, he applied the broken color and visible stroke of Impressionism to a single mass of vegetation. Decades later, at Giverny, he would spend his last years painting nothing but plants and water on a vast scale, in the water lilies. The interest in flowers as a field of color starts in pictures like this.

Provenance and where to see it

The painting was bought in 1929 by the American collector Chester Dale, whose collection came to the National Gallery of Art as a bequest in 1963. The gallery lists the image as public domain under its open access policy. Check the museum's website for whether it is currently on view; the Chester Dale Collection forms the core of the NGA's French nineteenth-century galleries. For more of Monet's still lifes and gardens, see Chrysanthemums and our guide to famous Monet paintings.