Flowers in a blue vase

For most of his career Delacroix was known for storms of action, battles and hunts and scenes out of Byron. Around 1849 and 1850, in his fifties, he turned for a while to flowers. He prepared several large flower pieces for the Salon of 1849, telling a friend he wanted to paint them not as decorative bouquets but as if they were growing in a garden, tangled and alive. This is one of the quieter results of that spell. He was often unwell in these years and spent long stretches away from Paris in the calm of the countryside, and the flower studies belong to that retreat. After his death the painting joined the museum at Montauban, the home town of Ingres, the rival whose cooler, line-driven art was everything Delacroix's colour was set against.