Flowers in a Glass Vase
1668.Room 018
This artist was a fundamental referent for Spanish still lifes in general and flower paintings in particular. He was that specialty’s consummate master and its leading light at the height of the Siglo de Oro, producing a plethora of works of unquestionable quality in a field already filled with them. He was also the most important artist with this surname, including close relatives and others. His abundant genius and characteristic affinities mark him as a master with a unique personality and a broad and lasting influence on his collaborators and both immediate and distant followers. The canvas presented here dates from his most mature period, just eight years before his death.
This absolutely masterful painting is both beautiful and admirably rendered with a refined and elegant monumentality that reflects his unquestionable perceptual capacity. Its varied and rich combination of colors fills almost the entire canvas in an agile, brilliant composition without fear of excess, despite its hint of horror vacui. Highly decorative and sincerely joyful, it manages to elude coarse overcrowding or tiresome irrelevance. Moreover, its combination of tonal contrast with formal diversity, and of apparent disorder in the arrangement of the flowers with strict symmetry in the overall group, produces a surprising harmoniousness and invites the viewer to contemplate its inextricable interweaving of calculated details with a fascination that borders on rapture.
Each species is easily identified, thanks to the clarity with which Arellano renders not only those in the foreground, but other smaller ones as well. And yet, this ability to endow each with its own personality does not impede their integration as parts of a balanced and expressive whole whose vivacity, vigorous dynamism and striking relevance suggest that the flowers have just been cut. We should add that the masterful use or light and color and the handsome arrangement of these flowers is perfectly complemented by the surprisingly perfect crystal vase and its totally believable water, as well as the manner in which it rests on an irregular stone pedestal with a flat surface. Finally, the neutral but contrasting background is yet another discovery that adds volume to this composition (Text drawn from Luna, J. J. : El bodegón español en el Prado. De Van der Hamen a Goya, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2008, p. 104).
