Vase of Flowers

Vase of Flowers from around 1901, at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, is characteristic of the single-vase format that Redon used repeatedly — a simple vessel of flowers isolated against a neutral or lightly colored background, without any additional context or narrative. San Francisco's holdings of French Post-Impressionism, strengthened through major bequests, include this as an important example of Redon's coloristic achievement. The vase format focuses all attention on the flowers themselves — their individual colors, their arrangement as a mass, and their relationship to the atmospheric background.

The vase of flowers against a light background gives Redon the purest opportunity to orchestrate color relationships: each flower a separate color note within the overall chromatic chord. The paint application varies from relatively precise petal description to loose, gestural marks that suggest flowers at the edge of perceptibility.