The Art of the Flower Audio Tour

This free audio guide includes 17 tour stops to complement highlighted works on display in the special exhibition "Van Gogh, Manet, and Matisse: The Art of the Flower." This art exhibition is co-organized by the Dallas Museum of Art and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia.

On-view at VMFA from March 21, 2015 through June 21, 2015, this exhibition explores the infusion of new spirit and meaning into the traditional genre of floral still-life painting in 19th-century France, even as the advent of modernism was radically transforming the art world.

Featured works of more than 60 flower paintings by more than 30 artists, including well-known painters such as Eugène Delacroix, Gustave Courbet, Henri Fantin-Latour, Édouard Manet, Vincent van Gogh, and Henri Matisse, as well as less familiar figures such as Antoine Berjon and Simon Saint-Jean.

These artists, whose careers collectively span the nineteenth century, engaged in a sophisticated reworking of traditional imagery, bringing the floral still life into dialogue with emerging models of science and commerce, and ultimately transforming the genre into a meditation on the nature of artistic representation itself.