Bouquet de fleurs

Bouquet de fleurs (1897) at the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris was painted during Gauguin's second Tahitian stay, in the difficult year that also produced Where Do We Come From? and the attempt on his own life. The flower bouquet still life belongs to the category of domestic subjects he returned to periodically throughout his career as a respite from the more ambitious mythological and figural compositions that defined his Polynesian project. By 1897 his flower still lifes were transformed by the experience of the Pacific: the palette was richer, the forms more boldly simplified, the overall intensity more concentrated than in his European flower paintings. The Musée Marmottan Monet, primarily known for its extraordinary Monet collection including the Water Lilies panels and a large group of Impressionist canvases, also holds this Gauguin as part of its broader engagement with the late nineteenth-century French tradition that Monet exemplifies and that Gauguin transformed.

The flowers are rendered with individual attention to each bloom's colour and form. The background is kept neutral or dark to allow the colour of the flowers to read clearly. The handling combines a degree of Impressionist looseness in the petals with more deliberate structuring of the overall arrangement.