Flowers in a Bottle

This is a small painting, about 46 by 33 centimetres, and its subject is just as plain: a cluster of cut flowers in an ordinary glass bottle. The Dutch had spent some 300 years perfecting the flower piece, those dense 17th-century bouquets arranged in costly vases. Working in 1910, Zandleven keeps that long subject but drops the finery. What he sets down is a simple bottle on a small canvas, closer to something seen on a table than to a showpiece. Alongside the woods and trees he is better known for, still lifes like this ran right through his work.