Still Life with Peonies

Still Life with Peonies (1884) at the National Gallery of Art belongs to Gauguin's flower painting under Impressionist influence, in the period when he was building his technical skills within the tradition of French still-life painting. Peonies were a subject associated above all with Manet, whose magnificent peony paintings of the 1860s had elevated the flower to canonical status in the avant-garde. Gauguin's engagement with the same subject reflects his deep admiration for Manet — he later described him as 'the greatest of the moderns' — and his attempt to match the older master's bravura handling within the Impressionist framework Pissarro had taught him. By 1884 Gauguin was technically accomplished within the Impressionist idiom, and this peony still life demonstrates that competence. The National Gallery of Art's possession of this canvas alongside later, more radical Gauguins from his Breton and Tahitian periods documents the full distance he would travel from conventional Impressionist flower painting to his own primitivist formal language.

The peonies are rendered with fresh, loose brushwork that captures the weight and complexity of the blooms without over-elaborating their detail. The colour is relatively naturalistically observed — the pink and white varieties recorded with careful attention to their cool and warm tones. The background is handled simply to foreground the flowers, following conventional flower-piece composition.