Violets

Rather than focusing on the detail of this bouquet of violets, American artist Roger Baker has captured something of its presence in the room. The painting is saturated in purply blues – evoking the perfumed intensity of these tiny flowers, so famous for their scent. Roger Baker was living in New York in 1961, after spending the late 1950s travelling through Europe with the composer Virgil Thomson (1896-1989). He was a watercolourist and oil painter, and also drew wonderful pencil portraits of friends, fellow artists, and patrons. Baker’s canvases are often, like this one, full of stillness. In them, sparse compositions are marked by planes of high-tone colour. This bouquet of hot-house violets is an everyday object, but in Baker's painting it also suggests the start of a story.