Flowers in a Vase 1920

Magnus Enckell painted "Flowers in a Vase" during an era when he was a very public figure and a leading symbolist artist. He navigated the prevailing currents of Finnish nationalism and artistic innovation during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. At the time, still life was considered a low genre, an art for women. While Enckell made his name, and his money, painting portraits, he returned to flowers, a symbol of the feminine, again and again. The loose brushstrokes and blurred forms grant the painting an ephemeral, dreamlike quality. This allows the viewer to contemplate the tension between the beauty of the flowers and their inevitable decay. By embracing a subjective and emotional mode of expression, Enckell challenges the notion of a fixed, objective reality, suggesting that beauty and meaning are always mediated through individual experience. Enckell seems to be inviting us to slow down, to notice, and to feel the pulse of life in its most fragile forms.