The White Peonies

Painted in 1914, as war broke out across Europe, this still life of white peonies represents the private, domestic dimension of Van Rysselberghe's practice that runs alongside his grand bathing figure compositions. Flower painting was a venerable genre that carried considerable weight in late nineteenth-century French and Belgian art — Fantin-Latour's flower still lifes set a standard against which Belgian painters inevitably measured themselves. Van Rysselberghe brought to flowers the same chromatic discipline he applied to landscape: each petal surface becomes an occasion to observe simultaneous contrast between warm lights and cool shadows. Peonies in particular, with their dense layered petals and white-to-cream colour range, present exactly the kind of tonal and chromatic problem that divisionist method was designed to solve. The year 1914 may invest this image of abundance and beauty with an inadvertent poignancy given the historical circumstances, though the painting itself preserves the untroubled serenity that Van Rysselberghe consistently brought to domestic subjects.

Oil on canvas with a light-dominated palette built around the challenge of painting white flowers in natural light. Divisionist touches of cream, pale yellow, soft rose, and cool blue-white distinguish lit petals from those turning in shadow. The green foliage is rendered in complementary warm-cool contrasts that make the white blooms appear to glow against them.