A Vase of Flowers

A Vase of Flowers, at the National Gallery in London, is one of the still lifes Gauguin painted during his 1896 Tahitian period, in which European floral conventions are inflected by his experience of the island's different botanical world. Gauguin had been a Sunday painter who began with landscape and still life, and returned to these genres periodically throughout his career to test the formal lessons he had learned from Cézanne, who influenced his approach to compositional structure and the relationship between painted objects and their surroundings.

Gauguin arranges the flowers with the formal assurance of his mature period, each bloom treated as a distinct chromatic unit within the overall composition. The vase is rendered with structural simplicity, its volume suggested through light and shade rather than the descriptive elaboration that Dutch still-life tradition would have demanded.