Vase with Flowers

Adolphe Monticelli spent most of his career in Marseille in deliberate isolation from Parisian art fashion, building a singular painterly language out of Delacroix's colour and Courbet's impasto into something entirely his own. His flower pieces of the 1870s–80s — among his most celebrated work — were rediscovered by Van Gogh, who owned several and considered Monticelli one of the few artists who had genuinely understood colour as the primary carrier of emotion. This Vase with Flowers embodies the encrusted, jewel-like surface Monticelli achieved by applying pigment directly from the tube.

Monticelli builds up his flowers in thick impasto ridges applied with palette knife and brush combined, creating a surface of almost sculptural relief. The dark ground is left largely visible between passages of brilliant crimson, violet, and white, so that the flowers appear to glow against shadow rather than sit in ambient light.