Still Life With Roses ,1948
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Note : The luscious blooms in this painting may have been a gift to Irma Stern, or could possibly have come from the old rose bed below her Rondebosch studio, which is no longer standing.In her lifetime, Stern’s famous garden at her house The Firs (now the Irma Stern Museum) was not nearly as shaded as it is today. The giant magnolia and oak trees have soared ever higher in the intervening decades, rendering the garden problematic for growing roses.Stern’s elegant composition seems to be dictated by the vertical tower of blooms held aloft by a black Chinese martaban, a severe and effective contrast to the roses’ lush, organic glory. The planes of the angular composition are balanced by the choice of the madonna blue on the left, the dense cream of the background, and the foaming blue white of the foreground. This was Stern in a gentle, reflective state of mind.We recall once again the words of American-British sculptor Jacob Epstein, quoted in Neville Dubow’s book on Stern. Epstein, upon seeing Stern’s rose paintings in London remarked: “At last a painter who can paint”.[i] As Dubow also points out, Stern was later to claim that Epstein added, “You and I understand one another. Renoir’s roses look like paper next to yours”.Stern’s roses in this work could even be compared favourably to the very great flower painter of the 19th century, French artist Henri Fantin Latour, and also that of her closer contemporary, the English artist Matthew Smith.Perhaps the inspiration for this particular rendition comes from the possibility that they were a bunch of birthday roses – they look like first flush October roses and Stern’s birthday was on the 2nd October.
Christopher Peter
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