We know our customers love gardens and flowers, so Rosewood is continuing our series of posts this year bringing you 20th century flower art.  Our choice for May is a French oil painting from 1909.  Bouquet of Flowers with an Ivy Branch was painted by Henri Rousseau.  He was a self-taught artist admired by Picasso and others.  Rousseau is most famous for his large jungle paintings, but he did several flower pictures, including this one.  It seemed a good choice for us because of the unusual inclusion of an ivy branch on the table.  Ivy is something that works brilliantly in living walls, but it doesn’t crop up very often in a standard bouquet!

The painting is in the collection of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, in New York state.  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’s 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 or you can read about other flower art by scrolling through our blog posts.