Pierre-Joseph Redouté Saint-Hubert 1759 - 1840 Paris

Paris, Salon, 1796, no. 391 ("Un vase de cristal, rempli de différentes fleurs, posé sur un socle d'albâtre");
Greenwich, Connecticut, The Bruce Museum; Fort Worth, Texas, Kimbell Museum, The Floral Art of Pierre-Joseph Redouté, July 20, 2002-March 2, 2003, cat. no. 6, p. 46-47.

C. Léger, Redouté et son Temps, Paris 1945, p. 147;
P. Mitchell, European Flower Painters, London 1973, p. 210;
M. and F. Faré, La Vie Silencieuse en France, La Nature Morte au XVIIIe Siècle, Fribourg 1976, p. 316, no. 506, reproduced;
C. Salvi, Pierre-Joseph Redouté: Le Prince des Fleurs, Tournai 1997, pp. 6, 66-67, illus.

This lush and elaborate still life, a tour-de-force of technique and natural observation, is one of the very few full scale oils that Redouté ever painted.  It is a cornerstone of his career and represents one of the last great masterpieces of the European floral still life tradition.   Redouté clearly had the examples of the great practitioners of the genre in mind—Jan Davidsz. de Heem, Rachel Ruysch, and more particularly Jan van Huysum— when he painted this picture.  However, the articulate and artistic description of the flowers is emblematic of Redouté’s individual style, a style which has secured his position as one of the greatest flower painters who has ever lived.

It was only natural that Redouté had turned to the examples of the great Netherlandish flower painters when he painted this Still Life of Flowers; he was himself not French, but a native of the town of Saint-Hubert, in the Ardennes.  From a family of artists, mostly minor decorative painters, he seems to have spent his early years training with them.  At the age of 13, Redouté left home and began an itinerant career as a student and painter, wandering throughout Luxemburg, Flanders and Holland, where he would certainly have come into contact with the paintings of Ruysch, de Heem and van Huysum that were to become such an influence on him¹.

By 1782, Redouté had moved to Paris, where his elder brother had a career as a designer for the theatre.  He was soon noticed by the leading botanical painter in Paris at the time, Gerard van Spaendonck.  An even more pivotal meeting was with the wealthy botanist and print collector Charles L’Héritier de Brutelle.  It was L’Héritier that would provide the young artist with access to the plants, specimens and books with which he was to hone his exacting and precise depiction of plants; in fact, Redouté provided many of the illustrations for L'Héritier’s book, the Stirpes Novae, which began to appear from 1785 on.  Important and prestigious commissions quickly followed: the artist was in England in 1787 examining the plants at Kew Gardens and meeting Sir Joseph Banks; in 1788 Marie Antoinette name him Dessinateur du cabinet de la Reine and opened the gardens at the Petit Trianon to him; and about this time Spaendonck asked him to paint the first of the botanical studies for the Vélins du Roi, a sort of “gouache garden” of various plants and flowers painted on vellum, that he was to produce for the next decades of this life.

By the advent of the Revolution, Redouté was already an established figure, intimate of some of the most important painters of his day and fully integrated into the artistic community of Paris².  He  began to show at the Salon for the first time in 1793³.  However, the present painting was by far his grandest Salon entry.  The composition depicts an abundance of spring and early summer flowers, painted with the fidelity that had already made Redouté famous as one of the leading botanical artists of his day. The abundance and variety of the blooms and the use of elements such as the stone plinth and the bird’s nest refer to the works of van Huysum and Redouté’s older contemporary Spaendonck.  However, the restrained and slightly cooler tonality of the composition is more neoclassical in its temperament.  It was clearly meant to impress, and he exhibited it in the Salon of the Year 5 (1796) as his only entry⁴.  Such public display in the most important forum available was meant to attract notice, and Redouté clearly hoped to gain attention by its display.  The artist had already had a banner year; he had moved with his family into the Louvre that year, a privilege vied for by any number of artists, and a recognition of his status by the state.  And at the same time, the artist had invented a new technique for color printing, using a single plate which gave his “engravings the soft tone and all the luminosity of the original watercolour.”  The Still life of Flowers, then, was meant to consolidate his position and attract new projects and patrons. 

It seems to have had the effect desired, and in the following years he would create some of his most famous works, culminating with Les Liliacées (1802-1816) and later Les Roses (1817-24).  His association with the Empress Josephine began in the early years of the 19^th Century, and he created for her the Jardin de la Malmaison (1803-5) along with further works.  However, Redouté did not continue to paint traditional still lifes, and this Still Life of Flowers disappeared from public view from the time of its exhibition in the Salon in 1796 until it reappeared in these rooms two centuries later, its astounding quality reconfirming the artist's stature.

1 For a discussion of the influence of these artists on Redouté, please see Peter Sutton “Redouté and Northern Flower Painting ,” The floral art of Pierre-Joseph Redouté, Greenwich, Ct. 2002, pp. 4-12.

2  A wonderful painting by Louis-Leopold Boilly depicting the Meeting of Artists in the Studio of Isabey, dating to 1798 shows Redouté amongst the leading painters of his day (Paris, Musée du Louvre, RF 1290).

3  Still Life of Flowers in a Basket with a Carafe, a Nest, and Cherries on a Marble Table, 1793, oil on canvas, Sale: Christie’s, London, April 19, 1996, lot 233.

4 The painting is dated  "an 4" in the Republican fashion.  In the Revolutionary period, the French calendar had been changed from the standard Gregorian to a specially designed schema which divided the year into twelve months, named not after pagan gods or emperors, but after natural phenomena.  The start of the calendar was reckoned to be September 22, 1792.  Thus, the year 4 corresponds to the span from September 23, 1795 to September 22, 1796.  It seems likely, therefore, that the present picture was painted starting in the spring of 1796, when the flowers would have become available.  It is interesting to note that instead of saints, as in the old calendar, each day in the Republican calendar was dedicated to a plant (with a few animals or farm implements).  Almost all of the flowers in the present composition were thus honored.  It seems unlikely that Redouté planned this as an oblique homage to the Republic; of foreign birth, he appears to have remained apolitical throughout the various changes of régime that France saw during his career.