A Vase of Flowers

A Vase of Flowers (1896) at the National Gallery in London belongs to Gauguin's second Tahitian stay, when his flower paintings were transformed by the experience of tropical botany. The lush, extravagant flowering plants of Tahiti — hibiscus, tiare, tropical orchids — had a chromatic intensity that European hothouse plants could not match, and his Pacific flower paintings were more saturated and formally bold than his earlier European floral still lifes. The National Gallery's possession of this canvas in London, alongside its major collection of European paintings from the Renaissance through Post-Impressionism, placed it in the context that acknowledged Gauguin's role as the bridge between the French tradition and the twentieth century. His flower paintings from the second Tahitian stay, of which this is a significant example, were among the canvases that Ambroise Vollard was selling through his Paris gallery to the international collectors who were establishing the canonical status of his work in the first decade of the twentieth century.

Gauguin arranges the flowers with the formal assurance of his mature period, each bloom treated as a distinct chromatic unit within the overall composition. The vase is rendered with structural simplicity, its volume suggested through light and shade rather than the descriptive elaboration that Dutch still-life tradition would have demanded.