【大都会 English script】第四章：花卉与花园 Flowers and Gardens

Chapter 4: Flowers and Gardens
<Introduction>
The word "paradise" derives from the Persian term for "enclosed garden," and that fact sums up the positive human response to cultivated, tamed nature explored here, the tended garden full of specimen trees and fragment flowers. The Judeo-Christian earthly paradise is the Garden of Eden, the idyllic landscape where Adam and Eve lived in harmony with nature before the Fall. A garden is nature shaped by the human hand, and artistic representations of gardens take this intervention one step further. The dense interplay of flowers and fruit in a seventeenth-century textile conveys rich and bountiful cultivation, while a Pierre-Auguste Renoir's painting of Versailles presents a formal garden in an informal way.
Flowers seem to epitomize beauty, so universal is the response they elicit. As such, they are among the most persistent decorative motifs in many civilizations, from antiquity to the present. They adorn metalwork and textiles, ceramics and cabinetry. Their forms can be abstracted to create ornamental patterns or meticulously represented, as though studied with a botanist's eye. At times, the form of the flower is sculpturally adopted to shape an object, such as a glass vase by Tiffany & Co., a delicate wonder of fragility. More commonly, blossoms are depicted strewn across a surface, as on a massive Herter Brothers wardrobe, or rigorously ordered, as in the case of a sixteenth-century Islamic tile or an Art Nouveau textile from France.
Like animals, flowers sometimes serve as symbols. All flowers have brief moments of perfection, and so their portrayal often implies the idea of transience. A seventeenth-century floral still life is a lavish display of beauty, but it is also a sermon on the evanescence of the moment.
                
                
Tray with Rasulid emblem
1250–1300
Egyptian or Syrian
Brass inlaid with silver and black paste
H. 2.8 cm, Diam. 74 cm
Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 (91.1.603)
This brass tray bearing silver inlay and black paste incorporates the elaborate names and titles of al-Muzaffar Yusuf, the Rasulid sultan of Yemen from 1250–95, whose stable governance stimulated maritime trade with Africa, India, East Asia, and Egypt through the port city of Aden. The Rasulid sultans commissioned numerous luxury inlaid brass items from Mamluk Egypt and Syria, and this example is stylistically consistent with contemporaneous metalwork from these regions. The use of Arabic inscriptions around the rim, the periphery of the interior, and encircling the center is typical of the Mamluk style, but here each band of inscription incorporates the Rasulid emblem, the six-petal rosette.
Between the inner and outer inscriptions, a large double rosette of forty-two petals encloses images of beasts and birds found at royal hunting grounds as well as depictions of musicians and dancers. In the central rosette, allegorical representations of the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Venus, Saturn, and Jupiter surround the sun. Although all of this imagery is common in thirteenth-century Islamic metalwork, it may have held specific importance for Sultan al-Muzaffar Yusuf.The domination of the strong over the weak implied by the hunting imagery echoes the sentiment in the inscriptions, which twice refer to the sultan as the "defender of the outposts." Musicians often appear in royal iconography, referring to courtly pleasures. The astrological signs may reflect the sultan's studied interest in the movement of the stars.
Reference:
Allan, James W. Islamic Metalwork: The Nuhad Es-Said Collection. London, 1999, pp. 76–79.
Allan, James W. Metalwork of the Islamic World: The Aron Collection. London, 1986, pp. 35–41.
Dimand, M[aurice] S. "Unpublished Metalwork of the Rasulid Sultans of Yemen." Metropolitan Museum Studies 3, no. 2 (June 1931): pp. 229–37.
                
                
Tile panel with floral motifs
Ottoman period, second half of the 16th century
Turkish, Iznik
Ceramic, underglaze painted, transparent colorless glaze
97 x 97.8 cm
Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917 (17.190.2086)
After the Ottomans conquered Constantinople in 1453 and made it their capital, renaming it Istanbul, large building programs to convert the Christian city to a Muslim one were inevitable. By the sixteenth century, rapid population growth in Istanbul led to the construction of numerous new mosques, madrasas, and houses. Meanwhile, the Topkapi Palace, home to the Ottoman sultans and their court, was the locus of successive decorating campaigns that involved tiling large expanses of wall. The increased demand for tile panels to adorn the palace and the city's new religious and secular structures stimulated innovation in ceramic production at Iznik, the Ottoman court's main source for both tiles and vessels.
This panel consists of four square tiles set in a border of oblong tiles with a repeating tulip, carnation and rosette design punctuated by cloud bands. The square tiles contain four stylized peony blossoms, alternating with split palmette leaves around a central lozenge formed by the stems of the flowers. The floral composition is consistent with the sukufe (flower) style that was a hallmark of Ottoman decorative arts in the second half of the sixteenth century. Perhaps as a means of satisfying the populace's appetite for vibrant floral ornament, the Iznik potters added a distinctive new pigment to their palette during this period. This tomato-red underglaze made of Armenian bole, an earthy red clay with a high iron content, not only provided a bright counterpart to the green and cobalt blue hues already in use but also introduced texture to the otherwise smooth surface of the tiles. The source of this panel, which could have been either a private or a public building, is unknown.
Reference:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Arts of Islam: Masterpieces from The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Exh. cat. New York, 1981, pp. 256–57, no. 108.
                
                
Table carpet with unicorns
ca. 1600
Northern Netherlandish
Wool and silk, 6 warp threads per cm
152 x 234 cm
Gift of P. A. B. Widener, 1970 (1970.250)
This large tapestry originally functioned as a tabletop covering. At its center, a unicorn sits in a gently rolling, wooded landscape, framed by a leafy garland decorated with fruit and ribbons. A profusion of blooming flowers and ripe fruits including pomegranates, apples, pears, and grapes surround the central scene. The unicorn's brilliant white coat stands out in contrast to the deep, rich hues of the botanical surround, and the piercing vista of the wooded landscape is pulled up sharply by the shallow perspective of the fruit, which must have appeared as if piled upon the table's surface when the carpet was in place. The unicorn and fruit motifs on each side of the tapestry's wide border are oriented to appear right-side up when seen hanging over the edge of the table.
Table carpets were a popular form of ornament in the domestic interiors of the Netherlands' nobility and wealthier mercantile classes. Tapestry weavers working in the Northern Netherlands made them in great numbers, although recent research suggests that Southern Netherlandish weavers also produced this type of product. According to medieval lore, only a virgin can tame a unicorn. The unicorn motif on this tapestry suggests that it may have been made as a marriage gift, or to pay homage to the Virgin Mary. Although the latter interpretation might seem an incongruous mix of the sacred and the secular, many surviving examples of table carpets combine floral motifs and miniature biblical scenes. The absence of any tulips amongst the flowers represented probably indicates that this tapestry predates the infamous "tulip mania," which reached its height in the 1630s.
Reference:
Standen, Edith A. European Post-Medieval Tapestries and Related Hangings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 1985, cat. 39.
Westermann, Mariët. Art and Home: Dutch Interiors in the Age of Rembrandt. Exh. cat. Zwolle, 2001, no. 31.
                
                
Nicolaes van Veerendael (Flemish, 1640–1691)
A Bouquet of Flowers in a Crystal Vase
1662
Oil on canvas
Oil on canvas
49.5 x 40.3 cm
Bequest of Stephen Whitney Phoenix, 1881 (81.1.652)
This exquisite flower painting dates from 1662, some six decades after artists such as Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568–1625) and Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder (1573–1621) first captured the attention of sophisticated collectors with their elegant and lush floral still lifes. The composition's low viewpoint, artfully asymmetric arrangement of flowers, and emphasis on illusionistic effects (for example, the reflection of a paned window in the glass vase) had become common features in Flemish still-life painting by the 1650s through the influence of Dutch artists including Jan Davdisz de Heem (1606–1683/84), who moved to Veerendael's native Antwerp in the 1630s, and Willem van Aelst (1626–1683).
The variety of flowers depicted in still lifes of this kind reflected the Netherlandish fascination with botany, a discipline that flourished in universities and among amateur gardeners ranging in social stature from modest merchants to dukes and kings. Artists studied these flowers, including the much-admired striped tulip, from life at different times of year, and also borrowed from books, prints, and other flower paintings. In this work, the fallen rose, water droplets, and cracks and chips in the stone tabletop emphasize the passage of time and the fleeting quality of life itself. The only insect present, a pale yellow butterfly at the lower left, is probably a symbol not of decay, but of the soul.
Reference:
Liedtke, Walter. Flemish Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 1984, pp. 271–72.
Mitchell, Peter. Great Flower Paintings. Woodstock, N.Y., 1973, pp. 251–52.
                
                
Emeline Travis Ludington (American, 1820–1887)
Quilt with floral appliqué
ca. 1850
Cotton
218.4 x 248.9 cm
Purchase, William Cullen Bryant Fellows Gifts, 2008 (2008.595)
The floridly naturalistic Rococo Revival style was in full bloom in the mid-nineteenth century, when this outstanding quilt was made. The colorful wreaths of grapevines and appliquéd flowers stitched onto the quilt's white cotton surface resemble the carved floral decoration found on the rich rosewood backs of high-style New York furniture of the same era. Many bed quilts were modest objects meant for everyday use; this stylish and sophisticated example, by contrast, likely served a decorative role. Its exceptionally good condition reinforces the notion that it was meant to be a "best" quilt, taken out only on special occasions to beautify the owner's home.
The work's maker was Emeline Travis Ludington, the wife of a Carmel, New York banker and the mother of six. Ludington had an ambitious artistic vision for her quilt, laying out and stitching a stunning composition comprised of four concentric rings of floral and vine motifs around a central urn overflowing with flowers. The design demonstrates Ludington's sensitivity to pictorial detail: blossoms at the foot of the urn on either side suggest the flowers have fallen from the bouquet. The quilt's unusual scalloped edge reinforces the twining form of the grapevine wreath, and the bright, multicolored flowers made from several layers of fabric add depth to the composition.
Reference:
Peck, Amelia. American Quilts and Coverlets in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 2007.
                
                
Herter Brothers (New York, N.Y., 1864–1906)
Wardrobe with stylized floral marquetry
1880–85
Ebonized cherry, inlaid woods
199.4 x 125.7 x 66 cm
Gift of Kenneth O. Smith, 1969 (69.140)
Herter Brothers, the New York firm formed by German-born and trained siblings Gustave (1830–1898) and Christian (1840–1883), was one of the premier cabinetmakers and interior decorators of the Gilded Age. Catering to newly wealthy Americans in the postbellum period who were building and decorating mansions commensurate with their enhanced economic stature, the firm designed and manufactured furniture and woodwork, as well as carpets, draperies, wall coverings, lighting fixtures, and fireplace tools. The Herter brothers utilized the finest materials and employed highly skilled craftsmen to execute their prestigious commissions, producing objects and interior decorations in a wide variety of styles.
Redolent of British reform design ideals that proselytized flat surface ornament and rectilinear forms, this Herter Brothers wardrobe is the quintessential response to the style first popularized by E. W. Godwin (1833–1886) in his influential 1877 book Art Furniture. It is spare, rectilinear, and, in the words of Charles Locke Eastlake, another British reformer, has "no extravagant contour or unnecessary curves." Despite its apparent simplicity, however, the wardrobe is a highly sophisticated object. One of the most remarkable examples in the Herter oeuvre, it combines various non-Western sources in its form and surface decoration. The wardrobe's shape references nearly identical seventeenth-century Ming Dynasty cupboards, while its ebonized surface and marquetry decoration in golden-toned wood recall Japanese lacquerwork. The contour of the articulated reserves in the upper band of marquetry looks to Islamic design. The stylized floral and foliate motifs derive from Japanese sources, and the ornamentation on the door panels, in which blossoms appear to gently fall to a void below, reflect Japanese design principles.
Reference:
Frelinghuysen, Alice Cooney, Katherine S. Howe, and Catherine Hoover Voorsanger. Herter Brothers: Furniture and Interiors for a Gilded Age. New York, 1994.
Johnson, Marilynn. "Art Furniture: Wedding the Beautiful to the Useful." In In Pursuit of Beauty: Americans and the Aesthetic Movement, edited by Doreen Bolger Burke, et al., pp. 142–75. Exh. cat. New York, 1986.
                
                
Childe Hassam (American, 1859–1935)
Peach Blossoms—Villiers-le-Bel
1887–89
Oil on canvas
54.6 x 46 cm
Gift of Mrs. J. Augustus Barnard, 1979 (1979.490.9)
One of the most prolific and successful American Impressionists, Childe Hassam found inspiration throughout his career in flowers and gardens. He was already an accomplished painter when he arrived in Paris in the autumn of 1886 for three years of study at the Académie Julian. Outside the studio, he appreciated the French capital's rich and varied artistic resources. Writing to the American art critic William Howe Downes (1854–1941) in the spring of 1889, Hassam lauded a diverse group of international painters living in Paris as well as the French Impressionists Claude Monet (1840–1926), Alfred Sisley (1839–1899), and Camille Pissarro (1830–1903), who "do some things that are charming and that will live." Although by 1886 French Impressionism was no longer an avant-garde movement, Hassam was among the first Americans to enlist its bright palette and rapid brushwork.
Each summer from 1887 to 1889, Hassam and his wife, Maud, visited friends at Villiers-le-Bel, a village about 17.5 kilometers northeast of Paris. Most of the works he painted there depict women at leisure in his hosts' manicured garden, which featured sanded walkways and flowers and shrubs confined to clay pots. Occasionally, he ventured beyond the garden walls to find vignettes of uncultivated nature. In this painting, Hassam focused on a blossoming peach tree. Undisciplined, slender limbs bursting with bright, delicate flowers veil the strong, clear forms of its trunk and principal branches. A summation of the varied artistic influences that Hassam had absorbed, this charming canvas recalls his early preference for homely and imperfect motifs in the Barbizon manner; demonstrates compositional skills he acquired during his years of academic study; shows his new command of the Impressionists' high-keyed palette, free brushwork, and sunlight effects; and announces his appreciation of Asian design principles, which had excited Western artists in Paris since the mid-1850s.
Reference:
Hiesinger, Ulrich W. Childe Hassam: American Impressionist. New York, 1991.
Weinberg, H. Barbara, et al. Childe Hassam. American Impressionist. Exh. cat. New York, 2004.
                
                
Decorated by Kataro Shirayamadani (Japanese, 1865–1948)
Manufactured by Rookwood Pottery (Cincinnati, Ohio, 1880–1967)
Bowl with Prunus blossoms
1890
Earthenware
H. 14.1 cm, Diam. 27.9 cm
Purchase, The Edgar J. Kaufmann Foundation Gift, 1969 (69.37.3)
The seed of the American art pottery movement was sown at the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, a pivotal world's fair held in the United States. Influenced by the foreign displays they saw at the Philadelphia exhibition, artists and potters throughout the country began producing vases and other vessels that were primarily artistic in function. One of the most successful of these enterprises was the Rookwood Pottery, founded in 1882 by Maria Longworth Nichols (1849–1932). Nichols employed a stable of talented artists who decorated ceramic forms utilizing a technique of underglaze slip painting adapted from the French barbotine. In 1887, Nichols fulfilled her dream of hiring a Japanese artist to work at her Ohio pottery by recruiting the porcelain artist Kataro Shirayamadami, who had been traveling in the United States. Shirayamadami enjoyed a long and successful career at Rookwood as one of their leading decorators.
Nature informed most of Rookwood's designs, including those of Shirayamadami. This bowl's decoration reflects the designer's Japanese heritage in its subject of delicate Prunus blossoms, or the Japanese cherry, a motif much favored in Asian art, as well as in its asymmetrical composition. The vessel's unusual shape features three grooved, strapped handles, which sharply contrast with its overall smooth surface. Shirayamadami only covered part of the bowl's body with blossoms, leaving the rest void of decoration to highlight the compelling visual effect of the luminous yellow-green glaze.
In September 1898, the interior design magazine House Beautiful praised Rookwood for its delicate surfaces, "only equaled by the finest Chinese and Japanese porcelains." The author's comparison conveys the period reverence for Asian prototypes and Western artists' widespread imitation of these models. Shirayamadami's work received a gold medal at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889, one year before this bowl's production.
Reference:
Ellis, Anita J. Rookwood Pottery: The Glorious Gamble. Exh. cat. Cincinnati, 1992.
Fowler, Elizabeth J. The Rookwood Sage: Kitaro [sic],Shirayamadani, Japanism, Art Nouveau, and the American Art Pottery Movement, 1885–1912. PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2005.
                
                
Designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany (American, 1848–1933)
Manufactured by Tiffany Furnaces (Corona, Queens, N.Y., 1902–1920)
Flower-form vase
ca. 1902–18
Favrile glass
H. 31.3 cm, Greatest diam. 11.9 cm
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. David G. Martin, 1987 (1987.140)
The blown-glass vessels from Louis Comfort Tiffany's Corona, New York furnaces are some of the most evocative work his craftsmen produced. Nature, in all its seductive aspects, proved to be an enduring muse for this multifaceted artist. Tiffany was constantly exploring new ideas and techniques for rendering natural forms in glass. The varieties and color combinations seemed endless.
While many of Tiffany's vases incorporate plant motifs in their surface decoration, this example conveys natural form through the shape of the vessel itself. Tiffany's talented glassblowers transformed the traditional goblet into a vase that mimics a flower in bloom. The flat, blown foot resembles a bulb rising into a slender stalk to an open blossom with a ruffled rim. The flower-form was also explored by contemporary European glassblowers, notably Emile Gallé (see cat. 73), in France, and Karl Koepping (1848–1914), inGermany. Tiffany's artisans created a number of variations of these delicate blooms, no two alike, which explore different shapes, colors, and degrees of iridescence.
Tiffany's willowy flower-form vases were popular among collectors. Emily Johnston de Forest (1851–1942), a well-known American art collector, patron, and close friend of the artist, displayed about twenty such vessels in the bay window of the library in her New York City townhouse, which had been redecorated by Tiffany in 1898. In describing these objects, she evocatively wrote: "I call this collection my flower garden."
Reference:
Eidelberg, Martin. Tiffany Favrile Glass and the Quest of Beauty. New York, 2007.
Frelinghuysen, Alice Cooney. "Louis Comfort Tiffany at The Metropolitan Museum." Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 56, no. 1 (Summer 1998).
                
                
Designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany (American, 1848–1933)
Manufactured by Tiffany Furnaces (Corona, Queens, N.Y., 1902–1920)
Vase with gladiolus motif
ca. 1909
Favrile glass
H. 41.8 cm, Greatest diam. 20.3 cm
Gift of Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, 1951 (51.121.22)
One of America's most versatile artists, Louis Comfort Tiffany embraced virtually every medium. Glass, however, was his true métier. Glassblowers in Tiffany's Corona, New York furnaces began producing innovative blown-glass vessels, which he dubbed "Favrile," in about 1893. Many of the vessels combined different colors of glass in a single piece; others revealed Tiffany's fondness for reflective surfaces with luster and iridescent effects. The theme of nature, however, unified his work. Often inspired by the plants and flowers grown in the extensive gardens he designed for his country estate, Laurelton Hall, located on Long Island's north shore, Tiffany's artistry conveyed his passion for nature in all its variety.
This unusually large vase features gladiolus blossoms, leaves, and stems. The vessel's height complements the flowers' verticality. Tiffany enhanced the three-dimensionality of the composition by superimposing the blossoms over the dissolving green stems. The multiple layers of clear, colorless glass soften the motifs, conveying an almost impressionistic appearance, and the chemical iridescence applied to the interior of the vase gives it a golden glow.
This vase was originally part of Tiffany's personal collection. The artist was particularly proud of his Favrile works, promoting them as collectors' objects in pamphlets, advertisements, and brochures. He simultaneously urged American and foreign museums to acquire them as exhibition pieces. In his words, these creations marked "a new epoch in glass." Tiffany's blown Favrile glass vessels were among the first examples of American design to be recognized outside of the United States. European museums purchased examples as early as the mid- to late 1890s; in 1897, the Imperial Museum in Tokyo (now the Tokyo National Museum) added thirty-three examples to its collection.
Reference:
Eidelberg, Martin. Tiffany Favrile Glass and the Quest of Beauty. New York, 2007.
Frelinghuysen, Alice Cooney. Louis Comfort Tiffany and Laurelton Hall: An Artist's Country Estate. Exh. cat. New Haven, 2006.
Frelinghuysen, Alice Cooney. "Louis Comfort Tiffany at The Metropolitan Museum." Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 56, no. 1 (Summer 1998).
                
                
Félix Aubert (French, 1866–1940)
Iris D'Eau (Water Iris)
1897–98
Printed cotton velveteen
104.1 x 85.1 cm
Purchase, Friends of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts Gifts and funds from various donors, 2005(2005.33)
Félix Aubert was one of the most prolific and successful designers of Art Nouveau textiles in France. He created numerous designs for furnishing fabrics as well as for other decorative arts, and was a founding member of the group L'Art dans Tout (Art in Everything), which promoted an integration of the fine and decorative arts. Later in his career, Aubert worked as a designer at the Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory.
Stylized plant and flower forms were an essential part of the vocabulary of Art Nouveau. The iris was one of Aubert's favorite motifs, and the flower made its way into his designs for mosaic flooring, stoneware plaques, lace, and printed textiles. This particular pattern was printed in several colorways and on various fabrics. The curving leaves and expressive petals of the tall and elegant flower were well suited to the sinuous lines of the Art Nouveau style. The artist rendered the iris easily recognizable without resorting to botanical specificity.
Aubert's innovative design also reveals his knowledge of historic European textiles. The leaves of each bouquet of irises connect with the one above, creating a framework device reminiscent of those used in sixteenth-century Italian textiles. However, the symmetrical network of bouquets contrasts with the swirling water encircling the flowers. Even more than the stylized irises, this swirling pattern evokes the spirit of the Art Nouveau style at its height.
Reference:
Cora Ginsburg LLC. A Catalogue of Exquisite & Rare Works of Art Including 17th to 20th Century Textiles & Needlework. New York, 2004.Greenhalgh, Paul, ed. Art Nouveau 1890–1914. New York, 2000.
                
                
Émile Gallé (French, 1846–1904)
Birch, rosewood veneer
Ombellifères cabinet
ca. 1900
101.6 x 30.5 x 121.9 cm
Anonymous Gift, 1982 (1982.246)
A revolutionary style known as Art Nouveau swept through Europe around 1900, fundamentally transforming the decorative arts and architecture. The sinuous, asymmetrical aesthetic took its name from the gallery L'Art Nouveau, opened by Siegfried Bing (1838–1905) in Paris in 1895, where the German-born dealer exhibited and sold the works of leading modern artists and craftsmen.
A dominant figure in the movement, Émile Gallé's study of botany, art, entomology, and chemistry at the University of Nancy, France, and in Weimar, Germany, served him well in his artistic career. He initially worked as a glassmaker, at his father's faience and glass factory in Nancy. In the 1880s he began designing and producing furniture as well. Among the first exponents of Art Nouveau to turn to nature for inspiration, Gallé incorporated flowers, leaves, and insects into his lyrical furniture designs. He encouraged numerous artists in his native city to abandon historicism and develop form and ornament based on the flora and fauna of their province of Lorraine. This group of like-minded artists, known as the École de Nancy, was a major force in developing French Art Nouveau.
While most of Gallé's furniture designs exist in numerous examples, this model is one of only two known versions in existence (the other is in the collection of Musée de l'École de Nancy). Following the doctrine he established for the École de Nancy, Gallé chose a design informed by the simple beauty of the plants and insects found in a humble pasture. A plant with umbrella-shaped flower clusters characteristic of species in the Umbelliferae family forms the silhouette and structural supports of the hanging cabinet, and butterflies in flight adorn the cabinet's marquetry panel door.
Reference:
Gallé, Émile. L'amour de la fleur. Nancy, 2008.
Garner, Philippe. Émile Gallé. London, 1976.
Le Tacon, François. Émile Gallé: Maître de l'Art Nouveau. Strasbourg, 2004.
                
                
Odilon Redon (French, 1840–1916)
Bouquet in a Chinese Vase
ca. 1912–14
Oil on canvas
64.8 x 49.8 cm
The Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ittleson Jr. Purchase Fund, 1964 (64.266)
Having worked almost exclusively in black and white for over two decades, Odilon Redon revealed his gifts as a colorist in the luminous pastels and paintings he made after 1895. The brooding imagery that had haunted his youthful vision and guaranteed him a devoted Symbolist following receded in favor of still lifes and mythological scenes in a more decorative and joyous vein that extended his circle of admirers in the early twentieth century. No less inventive, Redon's late flower pictures remain true to his artistic aim: "to place the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible." As in this bouquet from about 1912–14, such identifiable flowers as poppies and marigolds, which he had studied with a naturalist's sense of wonder, tend to emerge, anew, as fanciful, jewel-like patches of color against a misty, undefined background. The sensibility the French artist brought to "these fragile scented beings, admirable prodigies of light," recalls his early fascination with Darwinian biology and his close friendship with Armand Clavaud (1828–1890), curator of the botanical garden at Bordeaux.
Redon owned a variety of vases, which his wife, Camille, used in arranging the bouquets that formed the subject of his late still-life paintings. The delicately patterned white vessel depicted in this work appears to be the same one shown in the Metropolitan's Vase of Flowers (Pink Background) of 1906.
Reference:
Wildenstein, Alec. "Fleurs et paysages." In Odilon Redon: Catalogue raisonné de l'œuvre peint et dessiné. Paris, 1996, pp. 108–9, no. 1518.
                
                
Auguste Renoir (French, 1841–1919)
Versailles
1900–1905
Oil on canvas
52.1 x 63.2 cm
Robert Lehman Collection, 1975 (1975.1.202)
Auguste Renoir's autumnal painting of the magnificent gardens at Versailles presents an atypical view of the rigorously planned grounds. Rather than showcasing the formal interplay of vegetation, sculpture, and fountains that is the hallmark of the palace gardens, the artist focused on the luxuriant chestnut trees spilling out over the palisades. The Fontaine de la Pyramide and the surrounding statues, including the Knife Grinder,at right, a bronze copy of an ancient Greek sculpture, are reduced to compositional devices that establish a sense of scale and depth. The carefully clipped rows of cone-shaped yews leading up to the fountain are largely cut out of this view of the gardens from the base of the steps of the Grande Terrasse, facing the Parterre du Nord. The painting's emphasis on the overgrown trees contradicts the original Baroque conception of Versailles as nature disciplined, tamed, and ordered. Renoir, who greatly admired eighteenth-century French painting, here recalls the lush gardens and parks of Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806) and Jean Antoine Watteau (1684–1721). He reinterprets Versailles as a site of nature abundant and untrammeled.
This painting is an atypical work in Renoir's oeuvre. His early twentieth-century landscapes usually depict an idealized southern Mediterranean arcadia bathed in warm red tonalities. Versailles, with its purple-gray sky and gold-tinged fall foliage, eulogizes a distinctly northern clime. Nevertheless, the site of this painting establishes a sense of continuity in his work. Beyond the Fontaine de la Pyramide lie the Bassin des Nymphes and the Allée d'Eau. Renoir had looked to the sculptural reliefs decorating the Bassin des Nymphes in the mid-1880s, when he painted his masterpiece TheLarge Bathers (1884–87, Philadelphia Museum of Art). The gardens of Versailles, intimately familiar to the artist from this earlier work, thus served as a reference point for Renoir as he strove to develop his art beyond Impressionism.
Reference:
Bretell, Richard R., Paul Hayes Tucker, and Natalie H. Lee. Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Paintings in the Robert Lehman Collection. Vol. 3. New York, 2009.
Einecke, Claudia, and Sylvie Patrie, eds. Renoir in the Twentieth Century. Exh. cat. Ostfildern, Germany, 2010.
House, John, et al. Renoir. Exh cat. [London], 1985.
                
                
Stanley Spencer (English, 1891–1959)
King's Cookham Rise
1947
Oil on canvas
50.8 x 76.2 cm
Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 1981 (1981.193)
Thirty miles west of London, Stanley Spencer's native village of Cookham, on the banks of the Thames River in Berkshire, was a kind of earthly paradise for the artist. Its tidy but lush cottage gardens and the surrounding fields and woodlands were the source of much of his landscape imagery. Spencer, one of England's most prominent twentieth-century painters, made landscapes throughout his career, though he is best known for his idiosyncratic interpretations of biblical themes and his arresting portraits. Painted sur le motif (directly from nature), Spencer's landscapes were much admired and sought after during his lifetime, but he called them "potboilers," characterizing landscape painting as less spiritually fulfilling than figurative art. Nevertheless, Spencer's depictions of nature reveal the artist's profound attachment to his birthplace in the rural English countryside, and he invested them with the same meticulous workmanship and intensity of vision that he brought to his elaborate figure compositions.
Here the artist recorded in sensuous, abundant detail a brilliant summer view of an enclosed rose garden in Cookham's Rise, a neighborhood above the village center, where Spencer had moved after World War II. The proprietor, a Mr. King, may be present as the small figure behind the fence at the end of a neatly pruned hedgerow. With loving attention to every horticultural element, Spencer created a shimmering tapestry of green foliage animated by bright spots of floral color and rhythmically organized through the repeated verticals of fence posts, chimneys, gates, tree trunks, and stakes. The artist first realized the astonishingly precise scene as an elaborately detailed underdrawing, which can be clearly viewed with infrared reflectography. Before applying a single stroke of oil paint, and despite the rough weave of the canvas, Spencer drew nearly every leaf and petal with obsessive care.
Reference:
Parissien, Steven, ed., Stanley Spencer and the English Garden. Exh. cat. Warwickshire, 2011.