No. 89. The Big Bouquet. He loved still life painting and revered its long and noble history. He doted upon certain great moments of painterly stillness from the past: the pale bottles and vases of Giorgio Morandi, Picasso's Still Life from 1914 (the one made of grey painted wood and tassels), Gustave Caillebotte's array of Fruits Displayed on a Board from 1894, all those Cezannes, Manet's bouquets, Chardin's mouthwatering La Brioche (1763), Zubaran's hallucinatory Still Life with Basket of Oranges (1664)...well, the list was a long one. His trouble with still life was that he found the pictures mostly too small. However, his own recent still life, Arctic Bouquet, he now began to find oppressively large. The choice of scale had always been a traditional concern to artists--and it remained as subtle a business (full of nice discriminations and endless nuances) as it had been from Roman times. Clearly he had to think more about the size of things.