Bouquet of Flowers

Bouquet of Flowers from around 1902, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, belongs to Redon's most productive period of floral painting — the years around the turn of the century when he was making his most intensely colored and visually exuberant works. The Metropolitan holds this as a major example of Redon's transformation from a master of monochromatic darkness to an artist of luminous color — one of the most dramatic transformations in Post-Impressionist art. A bouquet of mixed flowers gave him the maximum opportunity to orchestrate color relationships: the proximity of different hues, the competition and harmony between different types of bloom.

The bouquet composition concentrates color in the center of the picture, the flowers emerging from a relatively dark vase into the luminous upper half of the canvas. Redon's handling of the individual flowers ranges from precise petal description to atmospheric blurring at the bouquet's edges.