Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum is enriched by Odilon Redon's first still life

Odilon Redon ’s painting Flowers in a Small Chinese Porcelain Cup (1884) officially becomes part of the heritage of the State of the Netherlands and has been destined for the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

This is the artist’s first still life, a small oil on panel (27 x 15.5 cm) characterized by an essential composition, suggesting a realization of a personal nature, not linked to commissions. Redon constructs the image with very few subjects: a Chinese porcelain cup holding a bouquet of deep red flowers against a neutral background in a suspended, meditative atmosphere.

The work belonged to the famous collection of Andries Bonger (1861-1936), one of the most important collectors of Redon’s works who had close ties to the Van Gogh family: he was the brother of Jo van Gogh-Bonger, Theo’s wife. Bonger purchased the painting directly from the artist in 1902 and included it in his own collection.

After a long stay in private ownership, the painting was transferred to the State of the Netherlands and placed in the Van Gogh Museum, thus contributing to the gradual recovery of the original Bonger collection. As early as 1996, in fact, more than one hundred works from his bequest, including paintings, pastels, and drawings, mostly by Redon, had entered the public collections and were destined for the Amsterdam museum.

Although floral compositions occupy a central role in Redon’s mature production, this painting belongs to a very early phase of his activity, when the artist was still bound to a visual quest dominated by dark atmospheres and monochrome tones. This is precisely why the painting represents a rare testimony of his early pictorial experiments. Until now, in fact, the Van Gogh Museum’s collection exclusively preserved floral still lifes after 1900. Instead, this work restores a more intimate and personal image of the artist, anticipating the poetic sensibility that would characterize his later, more luminous and chromatically rich floral compositions.

Finally, the catalog of Odilon Redon’s thirty-six works belonging to the Andries Bonger Collection, side by side with coeval works by Vincent van Gogh, is available in digital format. The volume, edited by Fleur Roos Rosa de Carvalho in 2022, can now be consulted online in its entirety.

Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum is enriched by Odilon Redon's first still life

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