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tulips, brilliant flowers carelessly placed in an old New England pitcher. 
I have been told that artists paint flowers for relaxation, but I don't believe it. I don't think any great painting, or music, or writing is done for relaxation. When an artist discovers something very special in life, whether painting a flower or composing a sonata, he is deeply concerned with the presentation through his sensitive technique of the beauty about him. Men paint, or write poems, because they are at a given moment in touch with the great miracle of living, not because they are bored with life. Redon painted his flowers with a sense of religious ecstasy, Gaugin painted those strange tropical blooms in a frenzy of joy, and suffering, perhaps. Glackens does his flower portraits, for that is what they are, with a crystalline detachment that goes way beyond color and form and gives you the ineluctable beauty that is in perfume, and in moonlight over water. 
To quote a brief speech that Mr. Glackens made when accepting the price for flower painting, "People talk", he said, "about arranging flowers, but these must be people who have never painted them, for all cut flowers if left alone arrange themselves just as they might grow in the garden. A vase of flowers if left alone arrange themselves just as they might grow in the garden. A vase of flowers looks better the day after it has been picked, for over night the blossoms will settle into a more comfortable and natural position. They are in fact living models". Glackens has painted so many pictures of flowers that it is difficult to make a complete record of them, but in recently studying some of them I felt always an extraordinary sense of light and air. They are never mere outlines against backgrounds for decorative effect; they are actually flowers drooping loosely, with air all about them and through them, and a background far away in color used only for the artist's purpose of enriching the subject. He has painted red tulips against a red ground, and mimosa against vivid green, an old fashioned jar