Bouquet de roses dans un vase vert

Renoir mastered a delicate and feathery brushstroke when he worked as a porcelain decorator early in his career. His love of colour and his delight in the sensuous qualities of oil paint was inspired by Rubens and the Venetian masters. The present painting displays his mastery of colour with its harmonious palette and sophisticated use of oil paint. As Renoir's student, Albert André said of his master: 'When the subject is a simple one, he attacks his canvas with his brush, generally dipped in red-brown, tracing a few very schematic lines to see the proportions of the elements that will constitute his painting. Then, immediately, in pure tones thinned with solvent, as if he were painting a watercolour, he rubs the canvas all over in a rapid movement and you can see appear something imprecise and iridescent, the colours running into one another, something that charms you even before you have begun to get a sense of the image' (quoted in Bernheim-Jeune, ed., L'atelier de Renoir, Paris, 1931).

In his still-lifes Renoir could concentrate purely on the colouristic and formal concerns. 'Walking through the garden, I pick flower after flower and gather them one after another as they come in my arm. Then I go into the house with the intention of painting them. I arrange them according to my fancy - and what a disappointment: they have lost all of their magic in the arrangement. But what has happened? The unconscious arrangement made as I pick them, based upon the impulse of taste that leads me from one flower to the next, has been replaced by a willed arrangement. This is influenced by memories of bouquets that have long since wilted but whose charm has stayed in my memory and guides me in putting together the new bouquet. Renoir said to me, 'When I have arranged a bouquet in order to paint it, I look at it from every angle and remain standing at the side I hadn't thought of' (quoted in G. Adriani, exh. cat. Renoir, Tübingen, 1996, p. 274).