The still-life played an important role in James Ensor’s œuvre, offering a wealth of painterly possibilities. With its effusive bouquet of flowers, articulated in a profusion of vibrant colours, Dahlias demonstrates Ensor’s fondness for the genre.

In Dahlias, Ensor looks back to the Classical still lifes of the Flemish Old Masters, which had long inspired him, whilst concurrently subverting this traditional method of representation through loose, expressive brushstrokes and a palette which blends bold colour with shifting pastel hues. The resulting painting exudes an atmosphere of playful exuberance indicative of the artist’s unique creative vision. Ensor further infuses Dahlias with motifs from his œuvre in the detailed patterns visible on the vase, which call to mind the Asian vases that frequently populate his paintings. From an early age Ensor developed a passion for Asian fans and china. This fascination for "the rich tones of delicate Chinese art" (James Ensor, Mes écrits, Brussels, 1944, n.p.) is rooted in the objects that decorated his family's souvenir shops in Ostend.

This influence continued throughout Ensor’s life and his studio was filled with various objects and objets d’art that inspired his painterly investigations. Ensor’s friend Emile Verhaeren described a visit to the artist’s home, writing that: "One crashes down the steep, turning staircase and one leaves, after a handshake, the painter's house, without further ado if it were not for the ground floor shop with its large cases overflowing with trinkets which holds our attention for a minute. Here, among the shells and the mother-of-pearl, the Chinese vases and the Japanese lacquers, the multicolored feathers and the brightly colored screens, the painter's visual imagination takes pleasure in compiling his most rare and his most sweeping symphonies of color. Oh the both tender and powerful nuances, subtle and brutal, sober and dazzling that he makes vibrate, through the use of any poor oriental trinket, forgotten by fashion. And the curled shell with which the morose bourgeois decorates his marble mantelpiece becomes, thanks to the magic, thanks to the artist's hermeticism, a miracle of triumphant color that would dazzle the most beautiful rooms of modern museums." (Emile Verhaeren, James Ensor, Brussels, 1908, pp. 6-7)

The importance of the present painting is evident in that it was first owned by the artist’s friend and long-term confidante Augusta Boogaerts. Ensor called Augasta ‘La Sirène’ and she appears in numerous portraits by the artist. Dahlias was then owned by the distinguished Belgian art collector Gustave Van Geluwe who owned a prominent Belgian fashion house and collected works by Ensor and prominent members of the Flemish expressionists including Gustave De Smet and Constant Permeke.