Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Still life painting, in contrast to his contemporaneous portrait practice, provided Renoir the welcome opportunity to extemporize freely in his technique. In the present still life, a profuse bouquet of roses provided Renoir with a pretext for a virtuoso display of brushwork, allowing him to create a rich weave of color and texture that fills most of the canvas.
Although Renoir relished the formal freedom that still life afforded him, he did not paint the ambitious floral compositions of the late 1870s and early 1880s solely as artistic exercises. Rather, like Claude Monet, he found that his still life paintings were more readily salable than other works during this period, a key transitional moment both in Renoir's career and in the history of Impressionism overall. Renoir continued to paint still lifes throughout his career, and he embraced with enthusiasm at the beginning of the 1900s a more experimental palette of flaming tones.
Although Renoir was not the avid gardener that Monet was, his corpus of floral still lifes nonetheless showcases a broad range of blooms, including roses, peonies, lilacs, gladioli, anemones, and geraniums. According to his dealer Ambroise Vollard, "Madame Renoir always kept flowers in the house, arranged in those inexpensive, pretty green vases that caught Renoir's fancy in the shop windows" (quoted in M. Hoog, Catalogue of the Jean Walter and Paul Guillaume Collection, Paris, 1987, p. 208).