The Bunch of Flowers

Painted c.1902 and now at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, this late floral still life belongs to the small group of flower paintings Cézanne produced throughout his career as interludes from his more systematic landscape and still-life series. Flowers offered both a practical challenge — the speed of their decay forced him to work from memory and from artificial flowers — and a chromatic freedom that he enjoyed. This late canvas shows the mature Cézannean method applied to a conventionally decorative subject, the blooms treated as volumes in space rather than impressionistic colour effects.

The flower arrangement is rendered in warm saturated colours — reds, pinks, whites, and yellows — applied in the characteristic modulated patches of Cézanne's mature technique. He avoids the soft atmospheric quality typical of floral still life, instead treating each bloom as a firm, rounded volume in space. The background and vase are handled with cool grey-blue tones that push the flowers forward.