Still Life: Bowl with Daisies

The Still Life: Bowl with Daisies at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts belongs to Van Gogh's sustained practice of flower still life at Arles in 1888 — a practice that produced not only the celebrated Sunflowers but a large body of smaller, more intimate works dedicated to specific flowers and their character. Daisies — the most common of summer flowers, their simplicity almost comic in contrast to the elaborate sunflowers — were treated with the same sustained attention Van Gogh gave every subject he chose. He wrote to his sister Wil in 1888 that he believed any flower, no matter how common, could be made into something extraordinary if observed and rendered with full attention. The daisy's specific structure — the white ray petals radiating outward from the yellow central disc — gave him a natural diagram of the complementary color relationship he deployed throughout his Arles work. The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts holds this alongside the Wheat Field Behind St Paul's Hospital and the River Bank in Springtime, making Richmond's museum one of the American institutions with the strongest sense of Van Gogh's range. The daisy bowl demonstrates that his flower still lifes were not made in the service of sentiment or decoration but as a form of sustained visual inquiry into color and form.

The daisy bowl is rendered with careful observation of each bloom's specific structure — the radiating white petals around the yellow center. Van Gogh's Arles palette brings warm color to the surrounding environment while the daisies themselves are rendered in fresh whites and yellows. Brushwork on the petals is delicate and varied, each flower individually characterized.