Vision: Vase of Flowers

Redon spent the summer of 1900 at a rented villa at Saint-Georges-de-Didonne, on the Atlantic coast near Royan, and this bouquet came out of the fields nearby. Daisies, cornflowers, poppies and ears of wheat, picked by the painter or by his wife Camille and painted straight away. The pot was real as well, a ceramic piece by the Russian artist Maria Botkina, though Redon loosened its pattern into something cloudier. Nothing else here is solid. He gave the flowers no table edge and no wall behind them, so the vase sits in a soft field of colour that shifts from earth tones up into pale blue. The Amsterdam businessman Andries Bonger bought it the following year. He was Theo van Gogh's brother-in-law, and his collecting is the reason a large group of Redons hangs in the Van Gogh Museum today. Writing to him at the end of December 1901, Redon called this one of the really good things he had painted, and said it had stayed with him like a vision. That is where the title came from.