Flower Power: How Flowers Have Been Represented in Art

    Manet reportedly called still life the "touchstone of the painter."
    From 1862 to 1870 he executed several large-scale tabletop scenes of fish and fruit, of which this is the last and most elaborate.
    It was inspired by the donation to the Louvre of a painting of a brioche by Jean Siméon Chardin, the eighteenth-century French master of still life.
    Like Chardin, Manet surrounded the buttery bread with things to stimulate the senses - a brilliant white napkin, soft peaches, glistening plums, a polished knife, a bright red box - and, in traditional fashion, topped the brioche with a fragrant flower.

La Berceuse (Woman Rocking a Cradle; Augustine-Alix Pellicot Roulin, 1851–1930)

    The five versions of Van Gogh's portrait of Augustine Roulin, wife of his friend the postmaster of Arles, the present canvas is the one the sitter chose for herself.
    Van Gogh remarked that "she had a good eye and took the best."

Reciting Poetry in a Garden

    A lush landscape provides the setting for a picnic, complete with fruit and beverages in Chinese-style blue-and-white vessels.
    Two men sit in conversation, one writing and holding a safina (an oblong format book typically containing poetry), flanked by a man standing on the left and a woman on the right carrying a covered bowl decorated with Chinese designs.
    The patterned robes, silk sashes, and striped turbans resemble costumes depicted in seventeenth-century Persian drawings and paintings.