We know our customers love gardens and flowers, so we enjoy bringing you 20th century flower art.  For May, here is a French oil painting from 1909 by Henri Rousseau: Bouquet of Flowers with an Ivy Branch.  Rousseau taught himself to paint, and had no formal training.  However, Picasso and other artisits admired him nonetheless.  He is most famous for his large jungle paintings, but he did several flower pictures, including this one.  The individual flowers are all identifiable and look very healthy.  It’s almost as though they were picked from a garden with a Rosewood irrigation system!!

The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, in New York state, is where you can find the painting and view it.  It is a fairly small canvas (45.4 x 32.7 cm) compared to most of Rousseau’s work.  However, the flowers, the vase and the table are all in Rousseau’s usual style.  This is known as ‘naive’, as it is quite child-like with its flattened shapes and simplified areas of colour.

If you’d like to know more about the artist, you can read about him here.   Alternatively, you can read about other flower art by scrolling through our Blog and looking at pictures we’ve already featured.