Vase of Flowers

This painting and its pendant in the same private collection show a gilt metal, large-handled ewer of flowers resting on a roughly hewn and worn stone support against a grey background. A variety of large flowers are loosely arranged in the vases with a natural looking, informal air and an asymmetrical compositional relationship between the large and small blooms. The bouquets seem to overwhelm their containers and a sense of the fullness of the arrangements is conveyed by the depiction of the flowers occupying the planes farthest away from the viewer in less detail and in darker tones than those in the foreground. A number of climbing flowers tease the space around the flower pieces and particularly charming touches include the jasmine that trails over the ledge in one of the pictures and the convolvulus that seems to head towards the droplets of water on the ledge in the other. The conspicuous dew drops on the flowers and leaves in one of the paintings is an obvious means of persuading the viewer of the freshness of the blooms, although this device was relatively little used by Spanish flower painters. <P> <TABLE ALIGN=LEFT CELLPADDING=5 BORDER=1 WIDTH=320 BGCOLOR="#99CCCC"> <TR VALIGN=MIDDLE><TD><IMG SRC="/support/gif/listen.gif" BORDER=0 VALIGN=MIDDLE> Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 7 minutes):<BR><A HREF="#" onClick="w=window.open ('/music1/19_cent/tchaikovsky_nutcracker_waltz.html', 'newWin', 'scrollbars=yes,status=no,dependent=yes,screenX=0,screenY=0,width=350,height=350');w.opener=this;w.focus();return true"><B>Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: The Nutcracker, ballet suite, op. 71, Waltz of the Flowers</B></A> </TD></TR></TABLE>