The Flamingos

The Flamingos, dated 1870 and on panel in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Marseille, is an unusual subject within Monticelli's oeuvre — animal painting was not his primary mode — but the flamingo's visual qualities align perfectly with his aesthetic preoccupations: rich, saturated pink against dark water or green foliage, a form defined by colour and silhouette rather than anatomical detail, an exotic species that belonged to the Mediterranean world he knew from Provence's Camargue wetlands. The flamingo offered him a subject where his tendency toward pure colour sensation was entirely appropriate — no one expected flamingos to be rendered with academic correctness, so the liberties he took with form were naturalised by the subject matter.

Panel support allows the brilliant pinks and roses of flamingo plumage to be applied as thick, pure impasto strokes without the concern about cracking that canvas would introduce. Monticelli likely builds the birds from warm ground up, laying the most saturated pink passages as final surface strokes against darker water and vegetation.