3-002-572 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

Holy Water Stoup with Figures of Faith, Hope and Charity, 1864. Reignier trained at the School of Fine Arts in Lyon, France, and became a professor there, specializing in flower painting. Lyon was an important center for the silk industry, and because naturalistic floral motifs were popular designs for textiles in the mid-19th-century, flower painting was both encouraged and rewarded financially. Large textile firms would even keep their own greenhouses with flowers and plants for their designers to work from. Reignier’s symmetrical and tightly executed watercolor could have been easily adapted to be a design for a textile or wallpaper. This work was commissioned by William T. Walters in 1864 to be used as the frontispiece to one of his drawings albums containing works on paper with the theme of religious devotion.