Vase

Vase is a subject in art. The gallery holds 200 works in this subject in art, including works by Edgar Degas, Jacques-Louis David and Édouard Manet.

Few objects have carried the history of art as faithfully as the vase. As one of the oldest of all made forms—an open vessel of ceramic, glass, or non-rusting metal such as brass, bronze, or aluminium—it served the practical needs of storing, pouring, and display, but quickly became a surface for the highest artistic ambition. In ancient Greece, where a distinctive pottery tradition emerged around 1000 BCE, the vase was effectively the canvas of its age. The black-figure technique, developed near 700 BCE, rendered silhouetted figures in fired slip with details cut by incision; around 530 BCE the red-figure method reversed the scheme, freeing painters to model anatomy and emotion. Masters such as Exekias, who brought black-figure to its expressive limit, and the red-figure pioneer Euphronios turned amphorae and kraters into vehicles for myth, athletics, and war.

In East Asia the vase pursued a parallel destiny in porcelain. The kilns of Jingdezhen in Jiangxi perfected the cobalt blue-and-white wares that, under the Ming dynasty and especially from the Wanli reign (1572–1620), were exported to Europe in vast quantity. Their auspicious forms—the fertility-laden double-gourd and pomegranate vases—and the very secret of their manufacture, unlocked in Europe only in the eighteenth century, fueled centuries of collecting and imitation.

Within painting, the vase became indispensable as the anchor of the flower still life. Jan Brueghel the Elder, nicknamed "Velvet" or "Flower" Brueghel, was among the first to specialize in dense bouquets—blooms drawn from different seasons and therefore impossible in a single living arrangement—set against dark grounds and freighted with vanitas meaning on the brevity of life. The catalogue's *Flowers in a Basket and a Vase* and Severin Roesen's exuberant *Still Life: Flowers and Fruit* extend that lineage.

The motif also threads through portraiture and interiors, where a vase signals refinement, domesticity, and the painter's command of light on glazed surfaces—as in Edgar Degas's *A Woman Seated beside a Vase of Flowers*, Renoir's *The Daughters of Catulle Mendès*, and Marie-Victoire Lemoine's atelier scene. From Neoclassical revivals like Wedgwood's to modern abstraction, the vase endures as both designed object and enduring pictorial subject.