Flowers in a Blue Vase

Flowers in a Blue Vase (1875) by Adolphe Joseph Thomas Monticelli, now in the collection of Clark Art Institute, demonstrates the artist's skill in the still life genre, transforming everyday objects or natural specimens into studies of color, light, and painterly observation. Adolphe Monticelli was a Marseille-born painter whose wildly impastoed late Romantic figure scenes exercised a powerful influence on Van Gogh, who collected his work and explicitly modeled certain paintings on Monticelli's technique.

Monticelli applied paint with extraordinary impasto thickness — sometimes inches deep — building richly encrusted surfaces that transform his romantic fête galante subjects into glittering tapestries of color.