From “An Impression of Chrysanthemums” in Chrysanthemum (Botanical) by Twigs Way:
“Among the bouquet of chrysanthemum-loving French Impressionists was the artist and gardener Gustave Caillebotte (1848–1894)…. From an upper-class family background in Paris, he had started painting and drawing when the family bought a second country property in Yerres, also to the south of Paris….
“Caillebotte’s most famous image of chrysanthemums, painted in 1893 (now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York), was titled Chrysanthemums in the Garden at Petit-Gennevilliers, making it clear that these are plants grown in the gardens and not bought in as a still-life ‘prop’….
“It is an unusual close-up view of densely packed blossoms in colours ranging from white through yellows, golds and apricots to plums and rubies. The heads hang heavy and the grey-green foliage appears slightly wilted, as if battered by the sun of Normandy. As with so many of Caillebotte’s paintings, the viewer is at an odd angle to the subject, raised and slightly slanting, and the mass is cut off on the top right and the left as if to admit defeat when trying to crowd them all in….
“A rather different painting of chrysanthemums, less full and with tones of whitish blues and browns, was accomplished by Caillebotte in the same year, entitled White and Yellow Chrysanthemums, 1893…. This painting belonged to Monet during his lifetime. In return Caillebotte owned a still-life of chrysanthemums by Monet, one of those rejected by France in the bequest settlement following Monet’s death in 1926. Caillebotte also painted cut chrysanthemums, as Monet had done earlier in his career, most famously in a group of several Japanese ceramics on a bamboo woven table.”
From “Let Us Pray for Darkness O Sparking Stars” in Call Me By My True Names by Thich Nhat Hanh:
If, one day, you need me,
and I should be absent,
please listen deeply to the murmur of a spring
or the thunder of a cascade.
Contemplate the yellow chrysanthemums,
the violet bamboo,
the white cloud,
or the clear, peaceful moon.
All of them tell the same story
I tell the singing birds today.
From “Autumn” in Poems by Norine Spurling:
Yellow mums spatter the garden
gentle Monet spots of color
stars in a sea of green
they dance in the late-day breeze
nodding toward the northern sky
quivering at the scent of autumn
that giddy emissary of brooding winter….
Hello!
This is the third of three posts featuring photographs of white and yellow mums and daisies from Oakland Cemetery’s gardens, from November and December 2024. The previous posts are White and Yellow, Mums and Daisies (1 of 3) and White and Yellow, Mums and Daisies (2 of 3).
Imagine my surprise when testing the links in this post that Oakland Cemetery recently launched a redesigned website — which looks pretty nice. But I was even more surprised that this redesign no longer includes a separate page with photographs and articles focused on their gardens, a page I frequently linked to in my posts. Actually, I’ve linked to it in 186 posts — which of course means that now I have 186 broken links to their ghosted garden page. Ah, well, these things do happen, I guess, and: I’m not gonna fix ’em! Unless eventually I do, which I may or may not.
I’m not terribly familiar with different schools of painting, except perhaps the Hudson River School which I studied while pursuing my history degree several hundred years ago. But since I provided a quote about Monet and Impressionism in the previous post (see White and Yellow, Mums and Daisies (2 of 3)), I enjoyed reading of Gustave Caillebotte, about whom an excerpt appears at the top of this post. His paintings strike me as a little closer to realism than those of Monet — though both painters rely on our fleeting impressions of light and color in their framing of chrysanthemum flowers. If you’d like to see the two paintings mentioned above — Chrysanthemums in the Garden at Petit-Gennevilliers and White and Yellow Chrysanthemums — you can find them on The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s page:
Caillebotte’s Chrysanthemums; or, Unexpected Encounters with Impressionist Interior Design.
Thanks for taking a look!
I’m not sure I would have given that painting a second glance if I was in the Met, which can be pretty overwhelming really. But it goes to show that you should take a second look and actually give each painting a little bit of time to just take it in and see what your brain does with it. At first glance it seems like a pretty staid, traditional picture, but definitely worth spending some time with it.
your own photos are excellent as always .
You know I probably would have done the same thing, especially since they look a lot like a million wall prints we’ve all seen (some of which were probably Monet or Caillebotte reprints). Then after reading about Impressionists painting mums and how they played with light and color, the paintings seemed different. I especially liked the Caillebotte painting where the right side to the bottom has a lot of shadows in it. It’s not how most people would compose a photo — but now I want to see if I can do something similar with the camera!
Thanks for the comment! 🙂