Pink Peonies
- Oil On Canvas
- 20 x 16 in
- Katherine Cox Knapp
It is a long artistic tradition to copy paintings of masters you admire to advance your own craft. This painting is my rendering of "Vase of Flowers" by Redoute.
One of the things I find so alluring about this painting is a feeling of shyness about the flowers. They are so fat and pink and luxurious, but they feel self conscious to me. Some are turning toward the light, some toward the shadow, but all are turning away from the viewer, hiding behind leaves, or facing entirely backwards.
The following is an excerpt about Redoute from The Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen where "Vase of Flowers" is located.
"PIERRE-JOSEPH REDOUTÉ(1750 - 1840) | 953.1.4
DATE: 19TH | TECHNIQUE: OIL ON CANVAS
Nicknamed “the Raphael of flowers”, Pierre-Joseph Redouté was a brilliant painter of flowers during the Age of Enlightenment, a time of great development in the study of nature.
If his work remains very important today (he participated in around fifty works on botany, Lamarck, Candolle, etc.), many of his original watercolors disappeared in the fire of the Louvre under the Commune in 1871 and his paintings are rare, his famous “roses” in particular. The Flower Vase from the Rouen Museum is therefore an exceptional work, especially since its state of conservation is excellent.
The artist's fidelity to nature is remarkable, in his painting, as in his watercolors. Although born in the Belgian Ardennes, Redouté did not cultivate the virtuosity of a northern miniaturist painter. The extraordinary impression of truth that emerges from his works corresponds rather to the fruit of a lifetime of scientific research, that of a man who lovingly respects nature."