Bernard Buffet

Private Collection (acquired circa 1990)
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Despite the genre’s association with tranquility and silence, Buffet’s exuberant still lifes hardly appear inanimate. Bouquet de zinnias proves no exception, as the artist contains his famed liveliness of color within the narrow confines of an ostensibly quiet interior scene. That Buffet produced over a dozen floral still lifes should come as no surprise when one considers his life-long reverence of natural elements and fervent desire to live among them.

His wife Annabel writes of his distaste for the surroundings of his Parisian upbringing and his attraction to rural life: “Born in Paris, and brought up by a loving mother in a small apartment, he could escape the concrete and stone only during those brief breaks from school… As soon as he was old enough to choose, he fled the crowds, the noise, the agitation of the city that suffocated him” (Annabel Buffet, Bernard Buffet: Paris (exhibition catalogue), Galerie Tamenaga, New York, 1989, n.p.).