Interpretive Resource

Around 1850 renowned Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix produced several large floral still lifes that gave the previously lowly genre a new legitimacy. Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet followed his lead in the 1860s, prompting many members of the Impressionist group to do likewise. Most of these paintings—by artists such as Pierre Auguste Renoir—celebrate the abundance of nature with brilliant color harmonies and bravura handling. Paul Cézanne also executed variations on this theme, showing floral compositions in the 1877 Impressionist exhibition. But by the time he began the Art Institute’s Vase of Tulips, his reservations about the Impressionist aesthetic had profoundly affected the tenor of his work.

In the present canvas, Cézanne depicted a casual arrangement, in a modest vase, of two red tulips—somewhat past their prime—and a scattering of smaller blossoms. Their petals and stems probe outward, set against a background brushed lightly with pale blue and green. The vase rests on a table whose surface is a rich patchwork of browns, olives, and purples. In addition to the vase, the table supports a pair of red apples and an isolated yellow-green one, their configuration oddly resonant of human affinities and tensions. Throughout, the color harmonies are subtle, the formal contrasts considered, the brush strokes supple. The result has a quirky charm, but there is also a suggestion of incipient disorder held in abeyance that is unique to Cézanne.

The dealer Ambroise Vollard reported that Cézanne painted some of his flower pieces using artificial blossoms. This may be true, for their longevity would have facilitated the prolonged process of revision that was now central to his working method.