Vase with Five Sunflowers

Sunflower is an annual plant native to the Americas. It possesses a large inflorescence . The sunflower is named after its huge, fiery blooms, whose shape and image is often used... to depict the sun. The sunflower has a rough, hairy stem, broad, coarsely toothed, rough leaves and circular heads of flowers. The heads consist of many individual flowers which mature into seeds, often in the hundreds, on a receptacle base. From the Americas, sunflower seeds were brought to Europe in the 16th century, where, along with sunflower oil, they became a widespread cooking ingredient. Leaves of the sunflower can be used as cattle feed, while the stems contain a fibre which may be used in paper production. What is usually called the "flower" on a mature sunflower is actually a "flower head" of numerous florets, crowded together. The outer petal-bearing florets are the sterile ray florets and can be yellow, red, orange, or other colors. The florets inside the circular head are called disc florets, which mature into seeds. The flower petals within the sunflower's cluster are usually in a a spiral pattern.
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Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to... prominence during the 1870s and 1880s in spite of harsh opposition from the art community in France. The name of the style is derived from the title of a Claude Monet work, Impression, soleil levant , which provoked the critic Louis Leroy to coin the term in a satiric review published in the Parisian newspaper Le Charivari. Characteristics of Impressionist paintings include relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes; open composition; emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities ; common, ordinary subject matter; the inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience; and unusual visual angles. The development of Impressionism in the visual arts was soon followed by analogous styles in other media which became known as Impressionist music and Impressionist literature. Radicals in their time, early Impressionists violated the rules of academic painting.
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