William C. Kennedy, New York
Reader's Digest, acquired from the above on November 26, 1956
Sale: Sotheby's, New York, November 16, 1998, lot 26
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

New York, M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., The Reader's Digest Collection, 1963, p. 35
Tokyo, Palaceside Building, Forty Paintings from The Reader's Digest Collection, 1966, no. 38
New York, Wildenstein & Co. (travelling exhibitions), Selections from The Reader's Digest Collection,  1985-1986 p. 70-71 (catalogued with incorrect dimensions: 20 1/2  by 24 7/8  in.),
Auckland City Gallery, The Reader's Digest Collection: Manet to Picasso, 1989, pp. 86-87

This work once formed part of the Reader's Digest Collection, which was begun in the early 1940s by Lila Acheson Wallace, who co-founded Reader's Digest with her husband, DeWitt, in 1922. Committed to creating a more visually pleasing and intellectually stimulating work e🉐nvironment, Mrs. Wallace acquired the holdings of French Impression🌳ist and Early Modernist work to form one of the first corporate collections in the world. The original collection of Impressionist and early Modernist works today totals more than 8,000 objects, including paintings, prints, drawings, photographs and mixed media works.

Vlaminck had gained notoriety in 1905 when he exhibited at the Salon d'Automne. The critic Louis Vauxcelles had seen a small Florentine style sculpture surrounded by the work of Camoin, Derain, Marquet, Matisse and Vlaminck in room 7 and wrote that it was like seeing a Donatello surrounded by wild beasts - "On dirait Donatello parmi les Fauves". Strongly influenced by van Gogh whom he venerated, Vlaminck's Fauve canvases were stridently colored and boldly executed, to such an extent that in 1907, the year of his first solo exhibition at the Galerie Vollard, he was christened "the wildest of the Fauves". Shortly afterwards, however, the description would no longer apply as during 1908, the year in which the present work was painted, Vlaminck abandoned the excesses of his Fauve manner in favor of a more subdued approach strongly influenced by Cézanne. The master of Aix was, of course, a major source of inspiration for much of the serious painting of the time, above all in the development of Cubism, and Vlaminck was no exception. Rather than following Cézanne's innovations to their logical conclusions, however, Vlaminck used Cézanne's example as a restraining influence, reining in the gestural audacities and coloristic excesses of his Fauve years. Only one year before Vlaminck had given an example of how the Fauve approach could be utilized in a still-life in Le grand vase de fleurs, 1907. A richly modulated sequence of dabs of strong color was used to define the flowers and the highly colored background leading to effects of great optical richness. In Vase de fleurs, however, Vlaminck opted for a more reductive approach, 🎀silhouetting an unadorned vase and a handful of flowers against a black background.