A Bunch of Dark Flowers

By 1919 De Smet was in the final stretch of his wartime years in the Netherlands, where he had fallen in with the Bergen School, a circle of Dutch painters who liked their still lifes dark and heavy. Their taste shows here. A bouquet is usually an excuse for bright colour, yet this one is built from muted browns and blacks laid on in broad, solid masses, the blooms flattened into blunt shapes rather than described petal by petal. The flowers sit low and close in the frame, painted more as weight than as fragrance, in the warm autumnal tones he was using for almost everything that year.