Flora

Van Rysselberghe's 'Flora' is an allegorical figure painting in which the Roman goddess of flowers and spring is depicted in the divisionist style. Allegory was an important category in Van Rysselberghe's output alongside portraiture and landscape, and Flora offered the particular advantage of combining the female figure — whose flesh tones provided rich material for divisionist colour analysis — with floral still life elements, each requiring slightly different optical treatment. The work's presence in the Museum of John Paul II Collection in Warsaw places it in a Central European context that reflects the international distribution of Belgian Pointillist painting in the early twentieth century. The undated canvas cannot be precisely placed within his career, but the subject and treatment suggest the mature divisionist period when he was producing his most ambitious figure compositions.

The allegorical figure of Flora allows Van Rysselberghe to juxtapose the warm flesh tones of the human body with the saturated colours of flowers, each subject demanding different divisionist colour analysis. The figure is probably set against a landscape or garden background whose greens and blues provide the chromatic context for the flesh and floral tones.