Giant Magnolias on a Blue Velvet Cloth
Twigs of a magnolia tree with light green, glossy leaves and three cream-white blossoms lie on a sapphire-blue cloth in this horizontal still life painting. Brightly lit from our left, the blossoms and leaves nearly fill the composition, and the cut ends lie on the fabric to our right. The blue fabric cascades from the upper left and across the table or ledge. The three flowers are in various stages of bloom. The tightest bud is to our left, overlapped by a stem and the tender, unfurling leaves of a branch. The blossom next to it, at the center, is starting to open. The petals of the third blossom, to our right, splay open around the flower’s oval-shaped stamen. Light glints off the waxy leaves surrounding the flowers. The tawny-brown underside of one leaf is visible where it turns over, near the cut ends of the branches. Light shimmering on the fabric darkens from bright blue to our right, to deep royal blue in the shadows to the upper left, suggesting the fabric is velvet. The background is streaked with tan and pine green behind the fabric, and becomes nearly black in the shadows of the upper right corner and along the bottom edge. The artist signed the lower right corner, "MJ. Heade."
Colors in this work
Details
- Artist
- Martin Johnson Heade
- Date
- c. 1890
- Medium
- oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- overall: 38.4 x 61.5 cm (15 1/8 x 24 3/16 in.) framed: 65.4 x 87.6 x 7.9 cm (25 3/4 x 34 1/2 x 3 1/8 in.)
- Department
- CAB
- Holding institution
- National Gallery of Art
- Palette
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- Image provider
- national-gallery-of-art
- License
- CC0-1.0
- Credit
- Gift of The Circle of the National Gallery of Art in Commemoration of its 10th Anniversary
Art Genome Taxonomy
6 tags
Subject Matter
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Still Life Both · 99%
The image shows a deliberately arranged group of magnolia branches, blossoms, leaves, and cloth; the museum identifies the work as a horizontal still life.
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Flora Both · 99%
Magnolia blossoms, green leaves, twigs, and a bud dominate the composition, and the museum description specifically identifies twigs of a magnolia tree with three cream-white blossoms.
Visual Qualities
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Dark Colors Visual · 97%
Deep blue cloth, dark green foliage, brown stems, and nearly black background passages occupy much of the image, contrasting with the pale blossoms.
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Highly Detailed Visual · 88%
The petals, leaf edges, stems, cut branches, and folded cloth are rendered with careful attention to botanical and surface details.
Medium and Techniques
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Oil Painting Metadata · 99%
The museum records the medium as oil on canvas.
Time Periods
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19th Century Art Metadata · 98%
The catalog dates the work to circa 1890, placing it within nineteenth-century art.
Source & rights
Martin Johnson Heade. Giant Magnolias on a Blue Velvet Cloth. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.
High-resolution sources
- IIIF image service ↗ 14,658 × 9,029 · National Gallery Of Art · Available