Bouquet of Flowers in a Vase

Bouquet of Flowers in a Vase of 1890, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, belongs to a group of floral still lifes van Gogh made at Auvers that reflect his enduring engagement with flowers as both subject and metaphor. Throughout his career from the Nuenen years onward, flowers represented for van Gogh a conjunction of natural vitality and impermanence that matched his sense of his own position — intensely alive, briefly present. The Met's holding of this work places it in the context of one of the world's great collections, where it is readable against Cézanne's and Redon's contemporaneous floral paintings as evidence of diverse approaches to still life at the end of the nineteenth century. The vase of flowers, loosely and urgently painted, captures the vitality of blooms that would soon fade.

Van Gogh renders the flowers in a range of highly saturated colours — reds, pinks, yellows, blues — applied with the directional brushwork that by 1890 had become his consistent signature. Each flower is identified by its colour and form rather than botanically specified, and the vase and table are painted with the same energetic attention as the flowers, refusing to treat the still life's lower elements as mere support.