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Azaleas and Apple Blossoms

Charles Caryl Coleman1879

de Young museum

de Young museum
San Francisco, CA, United States

Coleman was a prominent American expatriate artist who lived in Rome following the Civil War. In 1883, a writer for the "Roman News" described Coleman’s studio as “a scene from a fairy play [filled with] antique tapestries and medieval paintings and brass lamps and rich oriental rugs, which the magician Coleman has managed to bring together.”

This painting fuses European tabletop still-life traditions with Asian objects and aesthetics. The vase documents the vogue for antique blue-and-white china that entranced artists such as James McNeill Whistler. The flowers, silhouetted against a silk textile, recall the traditional Japanese art of flower arrangement known as ikebana (“arranged flower”), or kado (“the way of flowers”). Coleman’s composition epitomizes the aspirations and achievements of the Aesthetic Movement, which embraced the philosophy of “art for art’s sake” and promoted the beautiful as an ideal in
all aspects of life.

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  • Title: Azaleas and Apple Blossoms
  • Creator: Charles Caryl Coleman
  • Date: 1879
  • Physical Dimensions: w25 X h71 1/4 inches
  • media: oil on canvas
  • Credit Line: Museum purchase, Roscoe and Margaret Oakes Income Fund, gift of Barbro and Bernard Osher, J. Burgess & Elizabeth Jamieson Endowment Fund, and bequest of William A. Stimson
de Young museum

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