Fleurs dans un vase

A vase of flowers stands against a quiet background, the blossoms massed in loose, confident strokes that carry the picture by colour and rhythm rather than detail. Jacques-Émile Blanche — the Parisian portraitist of Marcel Proust and of the fashionable world, born in 1861 — painted such still lifes throughout his long career, and this one of 1898 shows the independent position he held between Impressionism and the decorative art of the fin de siècle: friends with the Impressionists, he was never formally one of them, keeping his own cool, ordered sense of design even in his flower pieces. The painting is held in the Petit Palais, musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris.