Arch of Morning Glories, Study for "A Basket of Flowers"

Arch of Morning Glories, Study for "A Basket of Flowers"

Eugène Delacroix

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This vivid pastel is a study for a painting in the Museum’s collection, Basket of Flowers, one of five "flower portraits" intended for the Salon of 1849. In February of that year, Delacroix wrote of the series, "I have tried to fashion pieces of nature, such as they present themselves to us in gardens, simply by bringing together, within the same frame and in a highly unlikely manner, the greatest possible variety of flowers." Here, Delacroix observes one variety: a thick, furled arch of white morning glories, which would provide the framework for an upended basket of flowers in the painted version. To effect the organic sprawl of the arch, Delacroix intertwined forest, moss, and chartreuse green pastels, setting them against a pale blue sky. Delacroix approached this subject with the same sense of drama that he did his narrative subjects. As art critic Theophile Silvestre wrote in his obituary for Delacroix, "He was a master painter, with sunshine in his mind and storm in his heart. Over the course of forty years, he touched the entire range of human passions with his magnificent brush, sometimes fearsome and sometimes tender, going from saints to warriors, from warriors to lovers, from lovers to tigers, and from tigers to flowers."

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Arch of Morning Glories, Study for "A Basket of Flowers"Arch of Morning Glories, Study for "A Basket of Flowers"Arch of Morning Glories, Study for "A Basket of Flowers"Arch of Morning Glories, Study for "A Basket of Flowers"Arch of Morning Glories, Study for "A Basket of Flowers"

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.