The Garden Party

Adolphe Joseph Thomas Monticelli was a Marseille-born painter whose richly colored, thickly textured paintings of fetes galantes, garden parties, and mythological subjects in jeweled, encrusted paint made him a distinctive and influential figure in 19th-century French art. Van Gogh admired him enormously and collected his work. This 1872 garden party scene exemplifies his characteristic subject — elegantly dressed figures in lush park settings, painted with a tactile richness of impasto and a palette of extraordinary chromatic intensity. The Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen holds this as part of its collection of 19th-century European painting.

Monticelli builds his garden party with extraordinary impasto — paint applied so thickly that the surface becomes a tactile, jewel-like relief. His palette is intense and warm, with reds, yellows, and golds dominating.