Bernard Buffet was a French Expressionist painter. A member of the anti-abstraction group L'homme Témoin, or "the Witness-Man", Buffet achieved critical acclaim as a staunch defender of figuration at a time when Abstraction, Minimalism and Conceptual art were more in vogue. Buffet's work spans a number of themes including portraiture, landscapes, and historical subjects. Painted in 1990, the present still life depicts the artist's iconic vase of flowers. The beauty of the subject is bound by the artist's dense black outlines, and characteristic flattening of the picture space and perspective.

Born in Paris, France on July 10, 1928, the artist enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts at the age of only 16 and was awarded the inaugural Prix de la Critique when he was 20. Buffet had a prolific career with his work housed in prestigious collections internationally, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Tate, London. In 1999, Buffet took his own life after a prolonged battle with Parkinson’s disease. In 2016, a major retrospective was held at Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris dedicated to the artist.