Flowers (Vase of Flowers on a Console)

Flowers occupy almost every level of this painting. They rise above a large decorated vase, gather on the marble beside it, tumble over the furniture and reappear as woven shapes on the seat below. The pleasure lies partly in following their movement: the eye keeps finding a blossom where it expected an empty corner. Frédéric Bazille made this imposing still life for his cousin Pauline and her husband Émile Teulon. Now in the Musée de Grenoble, it turns a domestic arrangement into a sustained encounter between growing things, cut flowers and manufactured ornament. The museum dates it to 1868. ^[1]

Which Flowers is this?

Grenoble’s Flowers, also called Vase of Flowers on a Console, is an oil painting on canvas measuring 130 × 97 centimetres. Its upright format gives the bouquet considerable height while leaving room for the curved furniture underneath. Michel Schulman’s catalogue dates it to 1867–68, a range that accommodates work begun before the year assigned by the museum. These dates describe the same painting. ^{[1] [2]}

Its distinctive furniture also helps separate it from Bazille’s other flower pictures. The Study of Flowers, or Potted Flowers, signed and dated 1866, presents several plant pots and a bouquet wrapped in paper. That is the picture associated with the Salon of 1868; the Grenoble console painting should not inherit its exhibition history. ^[3]

Here the setting is much more elaborate. A tall vase stands above an intricately carved support; an upholstered seat projects into the lower foreground. The bouquet has become part of an ensemble of possessions. Even where flowers seem to escape their container, they remain closely entangled with the shapes of the room. A green leaf crosses a painted ceramic pattern, a trailing stem interrupts the edge of the marble, and pale blooms hang against dark carving. The distinctions between objects are clear, but their outlines repeatedly overlap.

Following the flowers through the room

The vase is placed left of centre, rather than directly beneath the middle of the canvas. Its broad belly and substantial foot make a firm vertical support for the upper bouquet. Above it, however, stems spread outwards unevenly. Orange and red flowers cut through the darker greens, while pale rounded heads form small bright interruptions. The topmost flowers press close to the edge of the picture, giving the arrangement a scale that the container alone could scarcely suggest.

Look across to the right and the density changes. Much of the wall remains visible between branches and leaves. This lighter area allows individual stems to register as separate shapes, in contrast with the congested mass above the vase. An orange flower seen against the bare wall has a different pictorial effect from one surrounded by foliage: it reads as a crisp accent rather than a fragment of a larger coloured mass. Bazille makes both conditions part of the same arrangement.

Grenoble identifies dahlias, heliotropes and amaranths in the main bouquet, and a flowering bignonia spreading across the wall. It describes the light as entering from the right. ^[1] The compact flower heads contrast with a looser network of stems and elongated foliage reaching away from them.

Below the vase, a second concentration of flowers changes the direction of movement. White and yellow heads lie across the marble, and the stems lead diagonally towards the right. Other blossoms and leaves descend in front of the console. The eye can move from the upright bouquet, through this lower heap, towards the dark seat at the bottom. It is a staggered descent, interrupted by bright flowers at different heights.

The arrangement thus contains two different sorts of order. The furniture provides stable supports, recognisable edges and repeated curves. The plants cross those boundaries. Yet the flowers do not dissolve into an undifferentiated abundance. The lower pale blossoms make a distinct group; the upper red and orange marks concentrate elsewhere; the thin branches on the right open into intervals. What first appears profuse becomes legible through these differences of spacing.

The partially visible plant at the far left also matters. Its pot and leaves are cut by the edge, implying that the display continues beyond the canvas. Against that suggestion of a larger room, the right-hand branches press back into the picture. One edge opens outwards while another brings the eye back. The still life feels expansive without losing its compact vertical shape.

Marble, ceramic, wood and woven flowers

The vase offers a second kind of vegetation. Dark blue ornaments curl across its pale surface, organised into bands around the body and foot. The painted decoration is bounded and repetitive; the leaves immediately above it are irregular and overlapping. By setting the two together, Bazille makes the difference between a plant and its ornamental translation unusually easy to see.

The ceramic has sometimes been described as Delft ware. Schulman reports an identification with Montpellier production, based on foliage ornament noted by the earlier scholar Sarraute; Grenoble itself calls it Montpellier faience. That local identification is more carefully supported than a confident Delft label. ^{[2] [1]}

The vessel’s pattern also contributes to its apparent volume. Blue marks curve around the rounded body, becoming part of the description of its bulge. The dark outline around the rim separates the container from the bouquet, while pale passages below keep it from becoming simply a flat area of decoration. Its weight is convincing because its base, shadow and curved surface work together.

Grenoble identifies the marble-topped furniture as a Louis XV console. ^[1] On the left, dark carved forms coil beneath the light marble. On the right, a long curved leg creates an open interval under the tabletop. These supports do not have to be symmetrical in the picture to balance one another: the mass of carving on one side answers the greater visibility of the leg on the other. The flowers laid across the top connect these unequal areas.

The seat below repeats the floral subject in another material. Bright yellow, pale and red forms stand against a nearly black upholstery ground. Above them, real cut flowers hang over the console’s edge. The proximity encourages the eye to move between woven flowers and painted representations of actual blossoms. Both are made from coloured marks, yet their places in the room distinguish them immediately.

There is a small spatial surprise here. The seat looks available for use, but the cascading flowers occupy the area above it, making the display feel momentarily untidy. No person enters to rearrange them. The painting holds the room in a state between a prepared decorative setting and an arrangement still being handled. It suggests recent activity without identifying a particular household event.

A painting for Pauline and Émile Teulon

The domestic destination gives these furnishings particular relevance. Grenoble identifies Pauline des Hours, Bazille’s cousin, as the intended recipient, and considers Méric, the family property near Montpellier, the likely place of execution. The location remains a museum proposal rather than a securely reconstructed room. ^[1]

The correspondence discussed by Schulman supplies a practical creation history. In December 1867 Bazille was working on the Teulons’ flowers and allowing time for drying before dispatch. A letter dated 20 January 1868 still weighs alternatives: a game still life with a heron and jays might be sent if the painting in progress proved less satisfactory. The finished display conceals a period of hesitation. ^[2]

A cut bouquet suggests freshness and brevity; making and sending a substantial oil painting involves a longer sequence of work and judgement. Bazille’s concern with whether a canvas would be ready for its recipients sits behind an image that seems to offer flowers all at once.

The intended household also changes how one might understand the elaborate setting. The vase, marble and upholstery give the flowers a furnished social world. They allow the picture to participate in the decoration of a room while presenting decoration as its subject. That does not establish that the painted console belonged to the Teulons, or that the canvas was made for a particular measured space in their home. The painting’s destination is documented more securely than its precise original hanging position.

Nor does a domestic commission explain every formal decision. It helps us understand why such an expansive furnishing could be appropriate, but it cannot tell us which colours Pauline preferred or whether she requested a particular vase. The strongest evidence remains the encounter between the Teulons’ intended picture and Bazille’s visible choices: a large upright format, concentrated detail and flowers carried across several kinds of surface.

Why Grenoble looks towards Delacroix

The Musée de Grenoble presents the painting as an homage to Eugène Delacroix, drawing attention to his Vase of Flowers on a Console. The relationship offers a useful way to understand Bazille’s ambition for the subject. ^[1]

Delacroix’s painting, also known as Flowers in a Blue Vase, is dated about 1848–50 in the Louvre’s collection record. At 137 × 100 centimetres, it is close in scale to Bazille’s canvas. Catalogued as MNR 162, it is on long-term deposit at the Musée Ingres-Bourdelle in Montauban. These details identify the particular comparison behind the broader reference to Delacroix. ^[4]

The point is the possibility of treating a flower arrangement at a scale that commands a room. In Bazille’s picture, the flower heads retain their individual sizes while the total display grows large enough to organise the viewer’s field of vision. We move between single blossoms and a composition made from many blossoms, leaves, patterns and furniture parts. Small natural forms become the building blocks of an ambitious painting.

Bazille’s admiration for Delacroix has independent documentary support. In his letter to his cousin Louis of 27 April 1869, he discusses the painter enthusiastically while advising on purchases. His preferences also include Ingres, Corot, Rousseau, Millet and, with qualification, Courbet. The letter shows a range of artistic loyalties crossing any simple division between old and new painting. It does not identify this particular floral composition as something Bazille copied. ^[5]

The comparison remained part of the later exhibition context: the Louvre records Delacroix’s canvas in the Montpellier and Paris stages of the 2016–17 Bazille retrospective. That is evidence of curatorial comparison, rather than evidence of an encounter between Bazille and the painting. ^[4]

Schulman takes a more reserved view of Bazille’s result, questioning whether its abundance achieves the distinction of his other bouquets; he also records more enthusiastic assessments. The disagreement centres on the very density that gives the work its force. ^[2] A viewer may find that density enveloping or feel that it competes with the individuality of the flowers. Either response becomes more precise when attached to particular passages: the crowded upper bouquet, the clearer wall on the right, or the repeated floral shapes below.

Three different ways of organising a still life

Set beside the Study of Flowers, the Grenoble canvas shows how much a container changes a floral composition. In the earlier picture, individual pots remain visible along the bottom of the plants. The pale paper around the cut bouquet creates a separate shape in the foreground. Its 1866 date precedes the Teulon commission. ^[3] The console painting gathers its flowers into a more continuous display, while the large decorated vase becomes a commanding object in its own right.

The Still Life with Fish, also dated 1866, offers another comparison. ^[6] There, pale cloth spreads beneath the fish against a dark upper background. Its folds lead over the edge of the supporting box. Here, flowers perform much of that connecting work: they spread over the marble and descend across the support. In both paintings, an edge becomes something for the eye to follow and cross. The materials differ, but the problem of joining a tabletop to the foreground remains.

In the Washington Young Woman with Peonies, painted in 1870, the flowers share the composition with a woman holding a bouquet towards the viewer. ^[7] Her raised hand introduces a human action into the display. The Grenoble painting leaves such handling outside the frame. Its visible stems and scattered blooms make arrangement itself imaginable, while its furniture supplies the structure that a person’s body and gesture provide in the later picture.

These differences prevent Bazille’s flower paintings from collapsing into one decorative theme. Pots can separate groups; a vase can gather them; a hand can present them. The Grenoble work explores how far an arrangement can extend through a room while remaining a single pictorial subject.

From the Teulon family to Grenoble

The painting entered the Musée de Grenoble in 1940 through the François Teulon-Valio bequest. The museum’s acquisition heading dates the bequest to 1938, its narrative to 1937. The entry year is secure; the bequest year remains uncertain. ^[1]

Its passage from a family destination into a public collection gives viewers the opportunity to examine a painting conceived for domestic surroundings. The console no longer needs to echo furniture in the room where the picture hangs. Its curved leg, carved foliage and pale marble can instead be studied as active parts of the painted design.

At the lower edge, after the crowded bouquet, the ornamented vase and the cascade of flowers, the dark seat offers another small flowering surface. The subject has moved from plant to cut stem to ceramic pattern to textile. Bazille makes those transitions feel continuous while keeping each material distinct. The painting’s richness comes from that sustained exchange across the room.