Spray of Flowers 1858

Curator: This is Eugène Boudin's "Spray of Flowers," created in 1858. It resides now in a private collection, but allows us to examine his early treatment of still-life subject matter in oil on canvas. Editor: The dark background really makes the whites and oranges pop. There’s a romantic, almost decadent, mood it evokes for me with all these blossoms piled together. Curator: Boudin came to still life painting somewhat circuitously. He was really better known for his beach scenes populated by fashionable bourgeois of the Second Empire, which actually made him well-known with Parisian Salon audiences of his era. This canvas, and others like it, shows that his impressionistic style extended into less populated subject matter, revealing how important these explorations would prove to be for subsequent artists associated with Impressionism. Editor: I agree. Boudin’s application of paint in “Spray of Flowers” seems almost prescient in that regard. Note the soft, broken brushstrokes, particularly in the petals. It’s less about capturing photorealistic detail, and more about rendering light and suggesting form through color. Curator: It is interesting that his style prefigures many of the aims of Impressionism, but his approach to still life was considered very academic, continuing a long line of flower painting from the Baroque era in the Low Countries and France. It is only much later in his career that still lifes take on the looser compositions for which artists like Manet and Renoir became renowned. Editor: Perhaps, but those compositional liberties were earned through these early exercises, right? Without mastering these more constrained formats, the later innovations would have been ungrounded, visually incoherent. For me, the formal restraints, combined with that budding freedom in brushstroke, lend the picture tension and visual interest. Curator: I’d have to agree. While this artwork is not on public display, it highlights the crucial early experimentations that would later explode across Parisian art circles. Editor: Agreed, a formative, perhaps under-appreciated, work by Boudin.