Basket of Flowers
Italian Painter, 1529-1592 54 x 83 cm Museo del Prado, Madrid This painting of a basket of flowers and its pair (Madrid, Museo del Prado) follow closely a type of flower piece made popular by Juan de Arellano in which the flowers occupy an open weave wicker basket placed on a rough stone ledge. Such images of flowers casually arranged and filling an open weave basket differ from the formal presentations of bouquets in vases and were perhaps intended to be seen as recently-gathered fresh flowers on short stems. Although the paintings have been considered early works by P?rez for reasons of their closeness to the typology of Arellano s works, they show that the painter was evidently in full possession of the technical resources that distinguish his mature style. In the 17th century, flower paintings commonly made up the decoration of chapels and monastic institutions. While it does not appear that symbolism played a significant role in Spanish flower paintings, viewers of a more sombre cast of mind could have read a Vanitas message in such pictures, in which the brief life of the flowers was a metaphor for human existence
Painting ID:: 62321
Eugene Delacroix 1848-49
Oil on canvas; 42 1/4 x 56 in. (107.3 x 142.2 cm)
cjr Basket of Flowers French Romantic Painter, 1798-1863
For 40 years Eugene Delacroix was one of the most prominent and controversial painters in France. Although the intense emotional expressiveness of his work placed the artist squarely in the midst of the general romantic outpouring of European art, he always remained an individual phenomenon and did not create a school. As a personality and as a painter, he was admired by the impressionists, postimpressionists, and symbolists who came after him.
Born on April 28, 1798, at Charenton-Saint-Maurice, the son of an important public official, Delacroix grew up in comfortable upper-middle-class circumstances in spite of the troubled times. He received a good classical education at the Lycee Imperial. He entered the studio of Pierre Narcisse Guerin in 1815, where he met Theodore Gericaul
