Sun
1931

Each year on her birthday, Florine Stettheimer picked an assortment of seasonal flowers and recorded the event in her journal. The central motif of Sun is her sixtieth birthday bouquet. Stettheimer depicts the flowers entwined with a snake, suggesting the disturbance of a feminized Eden by a phallic serpent. The blooms are set against a terraced garden viewed from above, near the Hudson River. A woman, perhaps the artist, lounges under an arbor, contemplating the landscape with its Italianate architecture. Stettheimer included typography in this whimsical work and combined traditional perspective with distortions in viewpoint and scale. As was her common practice, the artist designed the painting’s frame and had it specially fabricated. Sun’s frame was made to simulate white lace, in keeping with the furnishings Stettheimer designed for her family’s New York apartment on West 58th Street in Manhattan and for her own midtown Beaux Arts studio overlooking Bryant Park.