Paintings I love
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)
Flowers
oil on canvas, 36 x 41.5 cm.
Painted circa 1879
Private collection
In the late 1870s and early 1880s, Renoir painted a sequence of elaborate foral compositions that number among the boldest and most fully resolved still-lifes of his career. In contrast to his contemporaneous portrait practice, in which the expectations of his well-heeled sitters often led him to adopt surprisingly traditional methods, still-life painting provided Renoir the welcome opportunity to extemporise freely in his technique. As the artist himself explained to Georges Rivière, “Painting fowers is a form of mental relaxation. I do not need the concentration that I need when I am faced with a model. When I am painting fowers I can experiment boldly with tones and values without worrying about destroying the whole painting. I would not dare to do that with a fgure ”.
Although Renoir relished the formal freedom that the still-life aforded him, he did not paint the ambitious foral compositions of the late 1870s and early 1880s solely as artistic exercises. Rather, like Monet, he found that his still-life paintings were more readily saleable than other works during this period, a key transitional moment both in Renoir’s career and in the history of Impressionism overall. Renoir had been a driving force behind the organization of the First Impressionist Exhibition in 1874. By the latter years of the decade, however, he was frustrated with the strategy of independently organized, cooperative exhibitions, which had brought little real success. Impressionism boasted certain prominent supporters, such as Émile Zola and Stéphane Mallarmé, but critical response to the frst three impressionist exhibitions (in 1874, 1876, and 1877) was largely uncomprehending or even hostile. Attendance at the exhibitions was slight, especially in comparison with the annual, state-sponsored Salons, and sales were few and far between. In 1878, a year before the present work was painted, Renoir decided to alter his commercial course. He exhibited at the Salon that year for the first time since the beginning of the decade, and he initiated a concerted – and ultimately quite successful – efort to become a portraitist to wealthy Parisians.
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