The Bunch of Flowers

The Bunch of Flowers (c.1902) at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow was acquired as part of the extraordinary pre-Revolutionary Russian engagement with French Post-Impressionist painting. The Morozov and Shchukin collections, assembled in Moscow in the years around 1910, were the most adventurous institutional concentrations of Post-Impressionist and Fauvist art in the world — the Shchukin collection alone contained thirty-seven Matisses and fifty Picassos alongside important Cézannes. The Pushkin Museum inherited these collections after the Revolution, creating one of the world's most significant concentrations of French modern art outside France. This late floral still life, painted in the final years of Cézanne's life, shows his mature method applied to a traditionally decorative subject — the flowers treated as volumes in space rather than sensuous color effects. By 1902 his reputation was established in avant-garde circles across Europe, and this canvas was acquired in the period of greatest institutional enthusiasm for his work.

The flower arrangement is rendered in warm saturated colours — reds, pinks, whites, and yellows — applied in the characteristic modulated patches of Cézanne's mature technique. He avoids the soft atmospheric quality typical of floral still life, instead treating each bloom as a firm, rounded volume in space. The background and vase are handled with cool grey-blue tones that push the flowers forward.