花瓶里的花束

Courbet made his name on big, deliberately unglamorous pictures of stone-breakers and country funerals, so a lush bouquet like this is a surprise from him. It comes from a single year, 1862, when a wealthy admirer named Etienne Baudry invited Courbet to stay at his estate near Saintes in western France. Baudry was a keen gardener with greenhouses and a botanical library, and out of that visit came a run of flower paintings Courbet made almost nowhere else. He treated the blooms like everything else he painted, in broad strokes and thick paint pushed around with a palette knife, nothing like the fine Dutch flower pieces of old. He mixed flowers from different seasons in the one vase, a bouquet that could never have stood on a real table at once.