Bouquet of Sunflowers - Claude Monet 1881

While living with his family at Vétheuil, a small suburb on the Seine northwest of Paris, Claude Monet took up floral painting both outdoors in the garden and indoors with cut flowers. From 1878 until 1883, he completed twenty floral still lifes, including this painting of sunflowers in a vase signed and dated by the artist in 1881. Bouquet of Sunflowers was shown at the seventh Impressionist exhibition of 1882, where critic Paul de Charry noted Monet’s "great talent" at painting still lifes (quoted in Isaacson 1986). The same year, he painted The Chrysanthemums, which has a nearly identical provenance. Monet exhibited both pictures in 1883 at the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel’s gallery, in 1886 with Les XX in Brussels, and in 1886 in New York at the National Academy of Design, making them among the first Impressionist paintings on view in the United States.