Flore 1913

Louise Abbéma made this painting, called Flore, using oil paint, probably sometime in the late 19th century. You can see how she’s built the image up from a very loose and watery underpainting in blues and purples. It's like she's letting the colors bloom across the canvas, a bit like the flowers she’s depicting, and there’s a real sense of artmaking as an unfolding process. Look closely, and you can see how the paint varies from thin washes in the background to thicker impasto in the foreground flowers and the figure. In the bottom left corner, you can see the brushstrokes becoming more active. The flowers are created with short, gestural marks, a kind of visual shorthand, where Abbéma is finding ways to suggest form and volume with these dabs and flicks of paint. The way she contrasts these almost abstract marks with the highly rendered figure makes me think of Manet, another Parisian painter who embraced flatness and ambiguity. Ultimately, Abbéma seems to be inviting us to revel in art's capacity to embrace different modes of seeing and thinking.