Pastoral Still Life

The painting is unusually elongated.

This work was in fact commissioned to decorate the Paris apartment of an art dealer.
Because it was intended to hang above a door, the canvas was made correspondingly wide and horizontal.

This is a still life by André Derain.

Objects That Symbolize Spring

Within the painting sit a straw hat, a basket of flowers, and two flutes.

These elements were recurring symbols of "spring" in eighteenth-century painting.

The straw hat and flowers evoke warm sunlight and the garden,
while the flutes stand for music and pleasure.

And so, even as a quiet still life, the painting radiates a strangely bright and buoyant mood.

But Why Do the Objects Seem to Float?

What is particularly interesting is the way the objects have been arranged.

In a conventional still life, objects rest stably on a table —
yet here they give the impression of hovering in midair.

The surface beneath them is ambiguous,
and the sense of space is never fully resolved.

Derain was here departing from the conventions of traditional still-life painting and experimenting with a new kind of composition.

He was depicting familiar objects,
while allowing the picture plane itself to operate with far greater freedom.

The Genre Derain Loved

Throughout his life, Derain produced still lifes in remarkable numbers.

Several of them can be encountered today at the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris.

For Derain, still-life painting was almost certainly more than the simple act of depicting objects.

Light and color,
form and balance,
and the very sensation of space — all could be explored with complete freedom on this stage.

And so even an ordinary hat and a basket of flowers,
in Derain's hands, are reborn as something slightly unfamiliar — and altogether new.