
Vase vert et fleurs
1928
A voluptuous arrangement of blooms cascades from a deep green vase in this richly composed canvas from 1928, painted at a moment when Henri Manguin had fully matured into his most confident and personal pictorial language. Working with the chromatic freedom he had cultivated since his Fauve years alongside Matisse and Marquet, Manguin here orchestrates warm pinks, creamy whites, and saturated yellows against a background that shifts between cool shadow and ambient warmth, achieving a balance that feels simultaneously exuberant and settled. The green vase itself functions as an anchor, its color singing in deliberate tension with the floral abundance it contains, and the brushwork throughout carries that characteristic Manguin quality of apparent ease concealing rigorous formal decisions. At 100 by 81 centimeters, the canvas commands real presence, and the scale suits the subject well, allowing the viewer to encounter the flowers almost at the threshold of the life-size. Still life occupied an increasingly central place in Manguin's practice during the late 1920s, and works from this period are often considered among his most resolved, free from any residual academic constraint and yet never tipping into the purely decorative. This is painting that takes genuine pleasure in its own materials, in the loaded brush, the responsive canvas, and the almost sensory richness of accumulated pigment. Signed by the artist and currently offered through Bailly Gallery, this work represents a strong opportunity to acquire a substantive example from Manguin's mature career. The absence of a frame allows the collector to consider presentation fresh, though the canvas itself needs no supplementary embellishment to hold a room.
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Overall
- Signed
- Yes
- Location
- BAILLY GALLERY, Paris
- Spotted At
- Gallery · BAILLY GALLERYView on map
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