Wildflowers with Porcelain Cup
by THOMA, Hans, Oil on canvas, 77 x 55 cm
Hans Thoma was a highly skilled practitioner of still-life who brushed at least twenty-two flower pieces between 1862 and 1887. Flower pieces were first popular in the seventeenth century. These decorative lessons in the fragility and passage of life addressed the moral of “Vanitas.” Thoma’s mastery of the genre betrays traces of Chardin and Fantin-Latour, but he Teutonized such Parisian sources by selecting German wildflowers and thrusting them into a German stein.