Clump of Chrysanthemums, Garden at Petit Gennevilliers, 1893 Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. The reproduction of Gustave Caillebotte also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.
Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 7-8 weeks to complete the process.

In case the delivery date needs to be extended in time, or we are overloaded with requests, there will be an email sent to you sharing the new timelines of production and delivery.

TOPofART wants to remind you to keep patient, in order to get you the highest quality, being our mission to fulfill your expectations.

We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
Also, there are postal restrictions, regarding the size of the shipment.
Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.

You can stretch and frame your painting in your local frame-shop.

Once the painting Clump of Chrysanthemums, Garden at Petit Gennevilliers is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

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The paintings we create are only of museum quality. Our academy graduated artists will never allow a compromise in the quality and detail of the ordered painting. TOPofART do not work, and will never allow ourselves to work with low quality studios from the Far East. We are based in Europe, and quality is our highest priority.

White pompons of chrysanthemum crowd the top of the canvas, so dense they feel like weather - a soft, powdery front rolling in. Around them, others flare in dulled crimson, apricot, and straw-yellow, each head a small galaxy of petals. There is no polite distance here. You stand, practically, inside the bed.

Paint does not so much describe as accumulate. Caillebotte lays the blooms in quick, radial strokes, then lets them fray at the edges, as if light is worrying away the outlines. One close-seen pleasure: those pale flowers are not simply “white.” They carry lilac shadows and touches of greenish cream, and a few petal tips catch a cooler, silvery note that makes them breathe. Down below, the stems rise in a thicket of deep viridian and bottle-green, brushed thinly enough for underlayers to glimmer through. The result is texture without fuss - you can almost smell the sharp, slightly medicinal scent of crushed leaves.

Caillebotte had been a gardener all his life, yet flowers arrive late in his painting, and that matters. By 1893, he is not testing how to paint a bouquet for show; he is painting cultivation itself - time, tending, abundance. This is Petit-Gennevilliers on the Seine, just beyond Paris, but the view is cropped so tightly that place becomes sensation: a wall of blossoms, a humid pocket of color, the press of growth.

Chrysanthemums, then wildly fashionable in France for their sumptuous hues and their East Asian associations, could easily have turned into mere décor. Instead, the picture holds a slightly unexpected note of seriousness. The lower half is all stalks and shadow, a green weight that keeps the froth of flowers from becoming frivolous. Perhaps that is why the work has been linked to Caillebotte’s idea for dining-room doors painted with plants - panels meant to live with, not to be “about” anything. One thinks, too, of Monet’s garden pictures at Giverny: not a botanical record, but an environment.

Seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York USA, Clump of Chrysanthemums, Garden at Petit Gennevilliers feels less like a still life than a close encounter. Caillebotte gives you the sensation of leaning in, hearing the hush of a garden, and realizing how much drama can be made from nothing more than flowers insisting on their season.