Flowers

Still life is not a subject generally characteristic of Romantic painting. Eugène Delacroix first turned to it in 1862 in Still Life with Lobsters . Ten years later he began painting flowers and thereafter repeatedly came back to still life. The subject of the present painting is reminiscent of the Louvre watercolour Bouquet of Flowers which belonged to the group of canvases painted in the late 1840s and which had little in common with previous renderings of floral still lifes in France. Particularly striking in this group is Study of Asters and Balsamine from Kunsthaus, Zurich, a canvas of almost the same dimensions and analogous in composition to the present work, so that the two might even be said to form a kind of diptych.