Vase of Flowers (c. 1905): Art, History and Details

Vase of Flowers (c. 1905) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Odilon Redon (French, 1840–1916).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Rapturous flower still lifes like this dominated the last decade and a half of Odilon Redon’s career and provided his greatest commercial success. His interest in plants and flowers began in his youth; child of wine producers, he grew up northwest of Bordeaux and was sensitive to fluctuations in weather, light, and temperature affecting the grape harvest. When he was 20, Redon met Armond Clavaud, a botanist and draftsman who illustrated his own compendium of flowers of the Bordeaux region. Clavaud’s meticulously rendered drawings sparked the young Redon’s imagination and helped to instill his desire to paint “nature, as seen in a dream.”

Object facts

• Title: Vase of Flowers
• Date: c. 1905
• Creator attribution: Odilon Redon (French, 1840–1916)
• Culture: France, late 19th-early 20th Century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on fabric
• Dimensions: Framed: 90.8 x 62.2 x 10.2 cm (35 3/4 x 24 1/2 x 4 in.); Unframed: 73 x 59 cm (28 3/4 x 23 1/4 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1935.233

A detail from the museum

Redon returned to the subject of flowers many times throughout his career. His interest in plants may have been inspired by his friend and mentor Armand Clavaud, a botanist and illustrator who lived in Redon's hometown of Bordeaux.

Collection credit

Gift of Roberta Holden Bole

Further reading listed by the museum

• [Cover]. Decorative Arts I, no. 1 (December 1934): cover.
• Francis, Henry S. "A Flower Piece by Odilon Redon." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art XXIII, no. 1 (January 1936): 4-6.
• "Cleveland Gets Redon Work: Vase of Flowers." ARTnews 34 (January 11, 1936): 16.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.