Still Life with Zinnias and Petunias

Provenance

Mortimer Levitt Gallery, New York, New York

Private collection, Connecticut

Sale, Fairfield Auction, Monroe, Connecticut, July 20, 2014, lot 91

Private collection, Connecticut

Sale, Fairfield Auction, Monroe, Connecticut, January 25, 2023, lot 66

Private collection, New York, New York

Related Works

Petunias and Zinnias, ca. 1926, oil on canvas, 30 x 24 inches; The San Diego Museum of Art, California

Art Deco Vase, oil on canvas, 40 x 30 inches; The Utah Museum of Fine Arts, University of Utah, Salt Lake City

Note: Jane Peterson painted an increasing number of floral arrangements following her marriage in 1925. For the artist, each cut flower offered a varied ephemeral beauty to understand. Peterson described, “The reason I paint flowers is because of all things in the world, I think flowers the most beautiful,” continuing, “Nature has expended on them a marvelous wealth of color—they scintillate the prismatic hues of the rainbow; they harmonize the pastel shades of the night; they are all that is delicate; all that is lurid, brilliant, bizarre. They are living things with personality and refinement, with delicacy of form and structure, with variety of size and shape, with rhythm and charm of arrangement, with grace and dignity of bearing.”_[1]

_[1] Jane Peterson, “Why I Paint Flowers,” The Garden Magazine 36, no. 1 (September 1922): 31.