Vaasje met bloemen en een grijsgele vlinder 1800 - 1900

Curator: It possesses a kind of gentle wistfulness, don't you think? Editor: It does. What we're looking at is "Vaasje met bloemen en een grijsgele vlinder," or "Vase with Flowers and a Grey-Yellow Butterfly." We believe it was completed sometime between 1800 and 1900 by L.W. Garrison. The artist employed watercolor and what appears to be coloured pencil in this piece. Curator: The choice of those media definitely contributes to that tender, almost fragile feeling. It captures a fleeting moment in such a delicate way. I'm struck by how Garrison depicts not only the flowers in their vase, but the butterflies in flight as symbols of transient beauty. Editor: Well, flower painting, and still life more broadly, experienced immense popularity across Europe during this period. Often, though, the arrangements functioned less as simple decorative subjects, and more as overt displays of wealth and trade. Looking at this piece, with the relatively common vase depicted, and more modestly rendered blooms, it perhaps speaks to a different kind of consumption, a smaller-scale engagement with bourgeois domesticity. Curator: I see that—yet I can’t help but wonder if the symmetry isn’t trying to evoke a specific meaning. One butterfly looks decidedly earth-bound, and that little plateau creates a stillness that balances that desire to take flight. Does that symmetry reflect a desire for balanced family life at the time, and, for instance, for women’s liberation without letting go of other "core values?" Editor: A reading informed by both cultural anxieties *and* emergent social desires, very interesting! Garrison, through composition and subject, manages to touch upon prevailing notions of naturalism and decoration within shifting social and political structures. Even in something that, at first glance, appears rather simple. Curator: Indeed. Ultimately, this painting, for me, embodies the beauty of observation and quiet contemplation of both domestic tranquility and cultural shift. Editor: And it’s in the blending of the wildness outside—captured by the fluttering insects—with the attempts at containment inside that makes this watercolor resonate, I think.