Bouquet of Flowers

Pissarro painted this vase of flowers in 1900, the year Paris filled with crowds for the Exposition Universelle and a new century began. He was nearly 70. For a man who had spent four decades painting open country in every kind of weather, a still life indoors was an unusual thing to attempt, and only a handful survive from his whole career. The flowers let him do on a tabletop what he normally did in a field, breaking a mass of colour into small separate strokes that mix in the viewer's eye rather than on the palette. He died three years later, and work like this stayed a rare exception in an output given almost entirely to the landscape.