About this work
A loose, luminous arrangement of cut flowers fills the canvas from near the center outward, the blooms rendered in Steele's characteristically open, broken brushwork — warm pinks, whites, and yellows pressing against one another with the easy authority of a painter who has spent decades studying how color behaves in natural light. The original is an oil on canvas measuring 22 by 29 inches, painted in 1913, and it now belongs to the Indiana State Museum and Historic Sites. The vase anchors the lower portion of the composition without demanding attention for itself; it is merely the pretext. What Steele is really after is the way petals catch and diffuse light — their softness, their momentary quality — rendered with an Impressionist's refusal to freeze or over-define.
Selma's fresh arrangements for the house motivated Steele to create floral still life paintings, and his first still life in many years appeared in the 1910 fifteenth annual exhibition of the Society of Western Artists. The timing is significant: by the early 1910s, Steele had fully settled into life at the House of the Singing Winds, the hilltop property in Brown County, Indiana he and Selma had built together. While the painter occupied himself with his plein air work, Selma transformed the forest floor into gardens, one of her stated reasons being to provide her husband with more varied color for his paintings — her gardens celebrated spring with masses of peonies, iris, columbine, foxglove, bleeding hearts, and lilies.
Although better known as a landscape and portrait artist, Steele had focused on a number of floral still lifes at this time, often arranging flowers from those gardens into a vase or some other kind of container. These intimate works let him explore pure color relationships stripped of sky and horizon — a laboratory for Impressionist thinking in miniature.
This is a painting that rewards a quiet room. It belongs in a space where natural light shifts through the day — a sitting room, a library, a hallway with an east-facing window — because Steele built changeability into the surface itself. Steele once described the transcendent property of good art as capable of "shifting the point of view from the detail to the general effect, from the actual things represented to their envelope of light and atmosphere." That philosophy is exactly what this painting enacts. It speaks to the viewer who doesn't need drama from art — only the attentive, unhur
