The picture probably belonged to Delacroix’s close friend Frédéric Villot, a fellow artist and curator in the Louvre. According to Villot, the picture was painted at Champrosay, near Fontainebleau. It shows a crystal vase of flowers, which are mostly dahlias. It is Delacroix’s earliest surviving flower piece and is handled more freely than his other, more ambitious, works of this time. Delacroix was the leading artist of the Romantic School, championing colour over line, as opposed to the more classical works by Ingres.