Flowers

Flowers, painted in 1906, applies Vuillard's Intimist sensibility to the still-life subject of cut flowers in a domestic interior, the blooms and their container integrated with the surrounding surface pattern in the characteristic manner of his mature approach. The Nabis had taken Gauguin's flat Synthetism and applied it to intimate modern subjects, and Vuillard's still lifes extend this approach to the domestic objects that furnished the interiors he spent his career observing. By 1906 his most radically compressed Nabi phase was behind him, but the formal preoccupations — the flattening of space, the integration of subject and ground, the muted palette — remained consistent. The Musée d'Art d'Indianapolis holds this canvas as part of its collection of French Post-Impressionist painting.

Vuillard's treatment of flowers applies his Intimist technique to still-life subject matter, the blooms and their domestic setting integrated through the mosaic-like strokes of muted color — ochres, pinks, greens, dusty roses — that define his approach. The flowers are not isolated as objects of beauty but absorbed into the dense decorative surface of the domestic interior, losing their distinctness in the characteristic Intimist fusion of subject and setting.