Still life with blue flowers and two bottles on a table (1907) by Gerda Wegener

Gerda Wegener’s ‘Still life with blue flowers and two bottles on a table’ is a vibrant dance of color and form, where delicate petals seem to tremble against the quiet solidity of glass. The blue flowers, almost luminous, spill from their vase with a wild elegance, while the bottles—one slender, the other stout—anchor the composition with their reflective surfaces. Light plays across the scene, catching the curves of the glass and the soft folds of petals, creating a harmony between fragility and permanence. There’s an intimacy here, as if Wegener captured a fleeting moment of beauty before it could fade.

The painting feels alive, not just in its subject but in the brushstrokes themselves—loose yet deliberate, as though each dab of paint was a breath. The table, barely suggested, becomes a stage for this quiet drama, where flowers and bottles converse without words. Wegener’s choice of blues, ranging from pale sky to deep cobalt, gives the work a dreamlike quality, as if the scene exists just beyond the edges of reality. It’s a still life that refuses to stay still, pulsing with the energy of an artist who saw the extraordinary in the everyday.