Bed of Chrysanthemums

In the autumn of 1897 Monet painted four close-up views of a chrysanthemum bed in his garden at Giverny, and this is one of them. What is striking is how he framed it. There is no horizon, no sky, no vase or table, none of the usual furniture of a flower picture. The blooms fill the canvas from edge to edge, so that you look straight down into them as a dense, all-over field of colour. When the critic Gustave Geffroy saw the group, he called the effect one of tapestry, the flowers woven flat across the surface like threads. It was an unusual way to treat a still life, and it points ahead to the kind of thing Monet would soon be doing with the surface of his water garden. He showed the four canvases together in Paris in the summer of 1898.