Vase of Flowers

Vase of Flowers (1878) is a very early work by Seurat, painted when he was just eighteen or nineteen and still a student at the École des Beaux-Arts. It shows his engagement with the still life tradition and with the study of colour and texture in a domestic object. Flower paintings of this period were a standard exercise in the academic curriculum, but Seurat brought characteristic attentiveness to the chromatic relationships between petals, leaves, and background. Now at the Fogg Museum, Harvard.

Academic in handling, the early work shows careful observation of colour relationships within a restrained tonal range. Brushwork is fluid and responsive to the varied surfaces of petals and leaves. The study demonstrates technical competence rather than the systematic colour division of the mature style.