White Flowers in a Bowl

For years this canvas belonged to Octave Mirbeau, the French novelist and critic who fought in print for the Impressionists and was also an obsessive gardener. He traded seeds, bulbs and cuttings with Claude Monet, and it was through Mirbeau that Monet found Félix Breuil, his head gardener at Giverny. Morisot painted these white flowers in 1885. They are reines-marguerites, China asters, the name under which the picture was shown in Paris in March 1896, in the exhibition of her work held the year after she died. She set them in a bowl beside a jug, laid them in with a loaded brush and short quick strokes, and left bare canvas showing at the edges. Still lifes make up only a small part of her work. After Mirbeau's death the picture was sold in Paris in February 1919, and in 1925 John Taylor Spaulding, a Boston collector, bought it in New York.