A Vase of Flowers

Gauguin painted this in 1896, soon after he reached Tahiti for his second and final stay. Red bougainvillea and hibiscus, white and yellow frangipani, white tiare and large blue leaves spill out of a dark clay pot against a golden ground, some already wilting and dropping onto the table. It may have begun as a study of a real bouquet and been finished from imagination. When the dealer Ambroise Vollard asked him in 1899 for flower pictures to sell, Gauguin replied that he had done only a few, because he did not copy nature, and that with him everything happened in his exuberant imagination. This canvas had already gone back to France, to his friend the painter Daniel de Monfreid, from whom Edgar Degas bought it in 1898 for 150 francs. Degas eventually owned 11 paintings by Gauguin.