Lot 25
  • 25

PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR | Bouquet de roses dans un vase vert

Estimate
800,000 - 1,200,000 GBP
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Description

  • Pierre-Auguste Renoir
  • Bouquet de roses dans un vase vert
  • signed Renoir (lower left) 
  • oil on canvas
  • 40 by 46.4cm., 15 3/4 by 18 1/4 in.
  • Painted circa 1912.

Provenance

Paul Cassirer, Berlin Wildenstein & Co., Ltd, London (acquired from the above)

Lord Hanson, London (acquired from the above on 24th January 1955. Sold by his estate: Christie’s, London, 21st June 2006, lot 207)

Richard Green Gallery, London

Acquired from the above by the present owner

Exhibited

London, Wildenstein & Co., Ltd., The French Impressionists and some of their Contemporaries, 1963, no. 58, illustrated in the catalogue (titled Roses in a Blue Bowl)

Catalogue Note

Renoir painted his first still lifes in the 1860s and they were a subject he returned to throughout his career. In part this was due to the financial security they provided – like Monet he often turned to them in his early years as a means of supporting himself – but the subject also provided endless opportunity for technical experimentation. His still lifes show the same exuberant brushwork and intuitive understanding of colour that define his best portraits and landscapes. In Bouquet de roses dans un vase vert Renoir achieves a wonderful spontaneity through a combination of free, looser brushstrokes and the interplay of colour and light that fill the composition. It is not surprising that the subject of a floral still-life appealed to Renoir. He had begun his career painting flowers on porcelain for the Sèvres workshop, and like a number of his fellow Impressionists he had often turned to flower-filled gardens as an ideal subject for his experimentations with colour and light. 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. Renoir painted many pictures of flowers in addition to the more numerous figures and landscapes. 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’ (Renoir Retrospective (exhibition catalogue), Nagoya City Art Museum, 1988, p. 247).



This work will be included in the forthcoming Renoir Digital Catalogue Raisonné, currently being prepared under the sponsorship of the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, Inc. This work will be included in the second supplement to the Catalogue raisonné des tableaux, pastels, dessins et aquarelles de Pierre-Auguste Renoir being prepared by Guy Patrice Dauberville and Floriane Dauberville.