#flowers

Stettheimer's better known for her chaotic party scenes and portraits of New York's art crowd. This is a rare quiet one — just a bowl of zinnias against a curtain.

He kept African and Pacific carvings around his studio and painted them into scenes like this one — the bowl in the title is one of them.

Apparently not everyone who studies Leonardo's other work is convinced this one is fully his — some think it's more workshop than master.

Apparently this wasn't the only time he painted his wife dressed up as a goddess - it was something he kept coming back to.

This is one stretch of a long handscroll — apparently there are eleven of these sections, meant to be unrolled a bit at a time rather than hung on a wall. The painter was, they say, a samurai retainer who did this on the side.

For decades he mostly made dark, unsettling charcoal prints — this bright, ordinary bouquet came from a total swing late in his career.

According to the Met's own notes, that's not the only woman in this garden — a second one is hidden among the rosebushes at the front, put there on purpose to blend in.

One of the late garden pictures, painted when his eyesight was going badly — cataracts, which he put off having operated on for years. Canvases like this sat around unwanted for decades afterwards, and it's said they only got taken seriously once abstract painting had come along and given people a way to like them.

This one apparently sold at a record-breaking auction price back in the 1980s, which is part of why it ended up in a Tokyo collection instead of a European one.

According to Wikipedia he starved himself on purpose, trying to see colours nobody else could see, and it killed him at thirty-five. That's presented as fact, not legend, which makes a vase of flowers feel like higher stakes than it should.

According to Wikipedia he spent the first half of his career working almost entirely in black — charcoal and prints, most of it pretty grim — and only came round to colour late on. The story behind the title is the usual one: a woman, a box she's told to leave shut, and everything bad in the world getting out of it.

The plants were painted first, outdoors beside a river over about four months, with the figure added later back in the studio — the model lay in a bathtub kept warm by lamps underneath, and the story goes that the lamps went out and she got badly ill. That obsessive outdoor detail was the whole point for the Pre-Raphaelites: paint the actual thing in front of you rather than a studio approximation of it.

This came out of a job rather than out of nowhere — according to Wikipedia the actress hired him to design costumes and sets for a huge open-air Joan of Arc she was staging, and the panel came along with that work.

I couldn't find much on this one specifically — from what I've read he turned out hundreds of small pieces around this time, sometimes several in a week, which seems like an unbelievable pace. If anyone knows more about this one, I'd love the story.

This came out of a run of flower paintings made in his last year, while he was living in an asylum in the south of France and painting whatever was brought to his room. The background was pink once, according to the museum's own notes — the red pigment faded out of it — so the pale white we get isn't the colour he actually mixed.

The title's a road — 17-Mile Drive is apparently a scenic toll route around Pebble Beach, and it was already a tourist draw when this was painted. So people were paying to see this exact view over a century ago.