Spring is here or at least mostly here, and the idea of flowers everywhere to herald the return of good weather, sunshine, and happiness comes naturally with the season. With that in mind, Of Art and Wine takes a look at some of the more famous painters of flowers, along with a short tour of springtime as celebrated in the vineyards of the Napa Valley. Let’s go, shall we?
Master Painters and Their Flowers
Behind his back, the six local gardeners whom Claude Monet hired to keep his gardens at Giverney called him “le marquis.” If he didn’t in fact have a royal title, he most certainly became art world royalty as leader of the French Impressionists and the creator of the national treasure of his gardens filled with waterlily ponds. In fact, Monet said, “My finest masterpiece is my garden.”
Monet was already quite rich and successful by the time he started working on the gardens and painting the waterlilies. He developed those paintings over the last 30 years of his life, roughly 1896-1926. He displayed some of them in 1900 and again in 1908 at Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris; however, their reception was not well taken, with some wondering about the old artist’s perception of things. Not wanting to deal with misguided commentary, Monet withheld the paintings and just continued to work. It wasn’t until 1927, a year after his death, that the paintings appeared in the especially made setting of the Orangerie. They were the artist’s gift of peace to the nation after the Great War (1914-1918), the canons of which he often heard from his peaceful gardens at Giverney.
Everything about the gardens and their ponds of lilies was a fantasy. The waters of a nearby river had been diverted to create the ponds. The lilies were not native to France, but imports from South America and Egypt. Ross King in his book Mad Enchantment, represents Monet’s gardens this way. “In short, the fabled waterlily location at Giverny, far from being a natural outcrop of rural France, was a laboratory in which Monet carefully assembled the colours and shapes to which he required access at a moment’s notice.”
Monet was not just interested in the beauty of the specific mixes of color, which he had crafted in his orders to the gardeners about what to plant and where, but in reforming the whole idea of landscape painting. His work in the latter days of his career moved towards decentralizing the standard imagery of landscape, taking away the normal boundaries that mark a scene and just putting the viewer somewhere out there among the lilies. Some have wanted to say that it was a process related to the slow development of cataracts, but if one looks at his work, one can see this removal of boundaries happening before his eye troubles. Of Art and Wine looks at this aspect of Monet’s work with the lily ponds in “Monet’s Lily Pond and the Last of the Summer Wine,” where art critic Stephane Lambert’s theories in Adieu a la Paysage (Goodbye to the Landscape) are examined (August 30, 2019 post). Above and beyond the beauty of the flowers in their watery existence were the theories of painting light and light reflected off of water, which the artist wanted to address, and in doing so open our eyes to a new reality.
The previous post on Of Art and Wine dealt with the whether or not of an affair between Berthe Morisot and Edouard Manet. Violets seemed to be the flower that he most associated with her. Manet famously said, “It is not enough to know your craft; you have to have feeling.” This painting is often seen as a private love message in what was on the surface a very proper relationship between the married artist, Manet, and one of his favorite models, Berthe Morisot, who ultimately became his sister-in-law. The red fan is something she carries in his portrait of her in The Balcony. The letter only shows it was addressed to Mlle Morisot and signed by Edouard Manet; however, the combination of the three symbols of romance from the Victorian Era, violets, a fan, and a letter, would possibly indicate a hidden love message.
Here we see Manet’s skill with a simple vase of Tulips and Roses (1882). Toward the end of his life, illness limited Manet’s mobility. He was only able to paint the flowers that people brought to him. However, his skill came to the fore with dramatic but simple settings like we have here. The stark whitish table with the abstract patterns of the bouquet’s shadows has a background of deep brownish black, which serves to highlight the color of the flowers. The real magic happens inside the crystal vase where a wild tangle of stems, leaves, and water play with our imaginations.
Irises by Vincent Van Gogh, 1889 J. Paul Getty Museum, California. Hover over image to magnify.
To say that Vincent Van Gogh had a special relationship with irises is putting it mildly. While, yes, he also painted sunflowers and those lovely spring almond blossoms gifted to his brother upon the birth of Theo’s son, Van Gogh’s irises are amazements to behold. The ones above were done within a week of his entry into the asylum in Saint Remy de Provence from flowers in the gardens of the asylum. He referred to them as the “lightening conductor for my illness,” a type of inspirational subject that let him hold on to sanity. Painting and perhaps in particular these rather close up paintings, as opposed to larger landscapes, seemed to focus his attention in ways that calmed his nerves (Van Gogh Close-up, catalog edited by Cornelia Homburg, Yale University Press, 2012).
Van Gogh’s irises are noted for their magnificent blues; however, there are some paintings in which the blues are just the remains of vibrant purples that have faded away. Somehow in his first weeks within the asylum, he focused intensely on the flowers’ rich purples, as it is a mix of peaceful blue and deep blood red. That volatile mix presents a color long associated with royalty, power, and wealth. Van Gogh suffered from poverty his whole life, with his paintings not selling until after his death. Irises are associated with death, as they were often used to decorate graves to help with that passage across the bridge made of rainbows represented by the Greek goddess Iris. This may also have been on his mind, especially since his own death, supposedly of suicide, happened the very next year, 1890.
The painting above was one that Van Gogh focused on in those early days at the asylum as he tried to regain health and mental stability while being surrounded with the mentally unstable. He focused on the color (originally deep purple but here faded to the blues) as a way to hold on to his own sanity. This painting was purchased after the artist’s death by an art critic who noted how well Van Gogh “understood the exquisite nature of flowers” (Octave Mirbeau).
Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), a Dutch artist, lived by a rather repressive theology which informed his philosophy of painting. It dealt with a purity of vision that only allowed for red, yellow, blue, and white and black, as well as straight or perpendicular joined lines (no diagonals, please).Yet, he also painted flowers. The watercolor above keeps to a lot of that basic philosophy about what the pure colors are, though he hedges a bit with the shadings of blue and white to create the bottle and the stamen of the flowers. Mondrian’s world of the abstract, represented by his more commonly known geometric works (see below) was the art to which the flowers were a counterpoint. He sometimes indicated that he did not like doing flowers because they were just the way he paid his bills when his “real art” was not being purchased. However, it does seem that he did flowers even after his artistic philosophy based on Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophy was fully entrenched. Perhaps in order to keep the more messy details of life arranged, he re-dated many of those flowers to an earlier period in his career before his ideas on art cemented themselves.
The beauty of his flowers with sometimes their starkly shocking colors or even unnatural colors were obviously items he may have enjoyed the painting of, even if he did not like the financial reasons for which he had to paint them. Often representing just one stem of flowers, like in Japanese painting, the spareness in the representation allows for the color to have greater impact. For more on Mondrian’s work look at this article “Piet Mondrian Did What? Flowers!” in the Art Blog at vernellestudio.com
Perhaps when looking at the duality represented in Mondrian’s geometric abstractions and the nature shown in his floral paintings, it is best just to enjoy them rather than fathom the dualities and conflicts in the complexity of the artist’s personality. However, just to really tickle our minds’ fancy, I will leave you with one of his trees.
Paintings used in this article are in Public Domain
Reference works used are as follows:
Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies by Ross King
“Life as Myth: A Bouquet of Violets” lifeasmyth.com
Van Gogh Close Up, the catalog for the art exhibition, Philadelphia Museum of Art, edited by Cornelia Homberg, 2012.
“Piet Mondrian’s Flowers” on ideasurges ideasurges.tumblr.com
For more on Marjorie Vernelle, see the author page at amazon.com/author/marjorievernelle or go to the Art Blog at vernellestudio.com.
Springtime in the Valley – the Napa Valley, Of Course.
Spring turns out to be one of the very best times to take a visit to the Napa Valley wine country. The weather is delightful, as the heavy heat of summer has not arrived. April is sparse when it comes to major holidays with vacations, as spring break has come and gone, and Easter does not create the traffic that Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s do. That all means many fewer tourists. However, it does not mean that the valley is dead.
The arts are definitely alive in the valley. The Arts Council Napa Valley has a calendar of events that range from poetry, to theater, to music, to plein air painting. The downtown districts of towns like St. Helena, Calistoga, Yountville, and Napa all take part. The Arts Council presents abstract art at the Guild Studio in the city of Napa, April 25 through the 30th as part of their April in the Arts program.
The Nichelini Family Winery hosts a plein air event on the 23rd and 24th of April, starting around 10:00. Artists come to work on their plein air pieces out on the grounds of the winery, while those who have wine tasting appointments are able to enjoy the wine and the artistic ambience. Artists who participate receive their own snack pack and complimentary wine tasting. The artists must sign up in advance, but there is no fee. Those who want to taste wine must make a tasting appointment, with tastings from 11:00 a.m until 5:00 p.m. For more information contact mail@nicheliniwinery.com
For music lovers, there is SIP Napa Valley (Songwriters in Paradise), the creation of Patrick Davis, a song-writer from Nashville who first tried this idea in the Bahamas and has since added Cabo San Lucas and the Napa Valley to his list. SIP is happening this year between April 21st and 24th in a variety of venues, see sftourism.com. If jazz is your thing, then head to the Blue Note on the first floor of the Napa Valley Opera House, for music every night of the week and of course wine to taste and samples of food.
For food events, this was the 11th year for the Appellation St Helena Wine Tasting and Food Pairing Competition. Yes, this is a competitive event, which brings out the best of the Valley’s wines and gourmet food items. Normally held either in March or April, mark you calendars in advance by contacting https://appellationsthelena.com.
You can Hike in the Vineyards at Pine Ridge Vineyards or find out more about viticulture at Stag’s Leap. Attend a Rose Garden Party April 16th at Silverado Vineyards, which comes complete with tea sandwiches, scones, savory bites and lawn bowling. Celebrate Easter Sunday at the Silverado Resort. Activities cover both the 16th and the 17th, with events for everyone in the family, including decorating Easter eggs, and dining well either at a lunch buffet or a prix-fixe three course meal for dinner.
For those wanting romance, on April 16 at sunset one can take the Napa Valley Wine Train for a marvelous meal and a romantic ride through the valley. It’s huge vistadome provides marvelous views and a nighttime of beautiful moonlight and stars. For more on the Wine Train, contact winetrain.com and find out about their many other romantic packages.
So, whether it is painting, wine tasting, musical entertainment, or just enjoying the scenery, it is all going on in the Napa Valley this spring, and it is still just April!
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©marjorie vernelle 2022
Coming Soon: The Curious Past of the Color Blue, plus Berry Wines.
We see it everyday, but have we really considered that Blue is a color with a past? In the Middle Ages it was a hot color; in our day it is cool calm and collected. Egyptian blue was used in ancient times, lost and rediscovered. The Maya blue found in the temples of Bonampak in the Yucatan has traces of azurite from Arizona! This color has had quite a life, so let’s explore it.