Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Acquired by the father of the present owner circa 1960

Created with careful attention to light and shadow, Vase de fleurs exhibits the artist’s ability to replicate the pure luxuriance of a floral arrangement.    As was the case for many of the Impressionist painters, Renoir did not need to rely on the trompe l’oeil techniques that had been utilized by artists for centuries in order to render this bouquet so convincingly.  Instead, he drew upon his own creative ingenuity and his initial impressions of the image, rendering it with extraordinary freshness.  Few artists of his generation would approach this subject with the richness and sensitivity that is demonstrated in his floral pictures.  Renoir once said of his flower pictures, "What seems to me most significant about our movement [Impressionism] is that we have freed painting from the importance of the subject.  I am at liberty to paint flowers and call them flowers, without their needing to tell a story" (quoted in Peter Mitchell, European Flower Painters, London, 1973, pp. 211-212). 

It is not surprising that a floral still-life, especially one as lush and abundant as this, would have appealed to Renoir.  Both he and Monet painted several more during the early years when the Impressionists first exhibited their work.  Perhaps it was his early success that encouraged Renoir to continue to paint still-lifes of flowers throughout his celebrated career.  As was noted at the time of a retrospective exhibition in 1988, "For an artist enamoured with color, flowers provide a perfect subject -- infinitely varied, malleable to any arrangement.  Several of Renoir's most beautiful paintings... are flower pieces. Flowers appear frequently in his paintings as hat decorations or as part of the landscape behind figures even when they are not the main motif.  Renoir himself said that when painting flowers he was able to paint more freely and boldly, without the mental effort he made with a model before him.  Also, he found the painting of flowers to be helpful in painting human figures" (Renoir Retrospective (exhibition catalogue), Nagoya City Art Museum, 1988, p. 247).