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Lot Essay
‘Painting flowers rests my brain. I do not bring the same tension to them as I do when I am face to face with a model. When I paint flowers, I place colours and experiment with values boldly, without worrying about wasting a canvas. I wouldn’t dare to do this with a figure, for fear of spoiling the whole thing’ – Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Painted between 1913-1915, Vase de Roses illustrates the central role floral still-lifes played in Renoir’s artistic development, the elaborate bouquets acting as a site for experimentation throughout his long career. Though frequently remembered as a painter of the female figure, flowers, with their endless nuances of hue and form, exerted an equal fascination upon the artist. While he recommended Julie Manet practice creating still-lifes “in order to learn to paint quickly,” the numerous and often highly ambitious works that Renoir executed in this genre over the course of his career attest to his sustained interest in the still-life genre as an end in itself (J. Manet, diary entry 29 September, 1898, in R. de Boland Roberts & J. Roberts, eds., Growing up with the Impressionists: The Diary of Julie Manet, London, 1987, p. 190). Indeed, it was in these compositions that Renoir pursued some of his most searching investigations into the effects of light and colour on objects and surfaces, exploring the subtle shifts in tone, texture and form that could be discovered from the smallest adjustments to the artist’s vantage point.
As he explained to his friend Georges Rivière, floral still-lifes such as the present composition provided Renoir with a certain respite from the demands of his large-scale portraits and figure paintings: “Painting flowers rests my brain. I do not bring the same tension to them as I do when I am face to face with a model. When I paint flowers, I place colours and experiment with values boldly, without worrying about wasting a canvas. I wouldn’t dare to do this with a figure, for fear of spoiling the whole thing” (Pierre-Auguste Renoir, quoted in M. Lucy & J. House, Renoir in the Barnes Foundation, New Haven & London, 2012, p. 263). The still-lifes he created during this period were, for the most part, simply staged, typically concentrating on a vase and flowers atop an empty table. Focusing the eye on the arrangement alone, Renoir imbued these humble, everyday objects with a sense of grandeur and monumentality, allowing them to fill the entire canvas, with some flowers even disappearing beyond the edges of the painting.
Although Renoir was not the avid gardener that Claude Monet was, his corpus of floral still-lifes nonetheless showcases a broad range of blooms, often including roses, peonies, lilacs, gladioli, anemones and geraniums in their arrangements. According to 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). Here, the artist focuses on a beautifully balanced bouquet of delicate roses with their swirling petals, colours ranging from soft pinks to richer reds and subtle yellows surrounded by luscious green leaves. Roses of pink, cream, and yellow appear frequently in Renoir’s later paintings, tucked behind the ear of a female model, clutched to a breast, or occupying the decorative ambient space of a composition. “The rhymes and echoes between the objects,” John House was written, “create a series of metaphysical associations; no one object is simply equated with another, but all become part of a single chain of connections: the physical splendour of young women; the richness of materials and gilded surfaces; the lavishness of flowers… Painting becomes a vehicle for suggesting the correspondence of the senses” (quoted in Renoir, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 1985, p. 290). The neat, impactful composition of Vase de Roses with its dynamic brush strokes reaching the canvas edges exudes and evokes a sense of harmony and joy – an intimate and poignant example of Renoir’s later still-lifes. This work, previously in the collection of renowned Surrealist patron Claude Hersaint, has resided in the same private collection since the early 1960s, and is presented here at auction for the very first time in its history.
Painted between 1913-1915, Vase de Roses illustrates the central role floral still-lifes played in Renoir’s artistic development, the elaborate bouquets acting as a site for experimentation throughout his long career. Though frequently remembered as a painter of the female figure, flowers, with their endless nuances of hue and form, exerted an equal fascination upon the artist. While he recommended Julie Manet practice creating still-lifes “in order to learn to paint quickly,” the numerous and often highly ambitious works that Renoir executed in this genre over the course of his career attest to his sustained interest in the still-life genre as an end in itself (J. Manet, diary entry 29 September, 1898, in R. de Boland Roberts & J. Roberts, eds., Growing up with the Impressionists: The Diary of Julie Manet, London, 1987, p. 190). Indeed, it was in these compositions that Renoir pursued some of his most searching investigations into the effects of light and colour on objects and surfaces, exploring the subtle shifts in tone, texture and form that could be discovered from the smallest adjustments to the artist’s vantage point.
As he explained to his friend Georges Rivière, floral still-lifes such as the present composition provided Renoir with a certain respite from the demands of his large-scale portraits and figure paintings: “Painting flowers rests my brain. I do not bring the same tension to them as I do when I am face to face with a model. When I paint flowers, I place colours and experiment with values boldly, without worrying about wasting a canvas. I wouldn’t dare to do this with a figure, for fear of spoiling the whole thing” (Pierre-Auguste Renoir, quoted in M. Lucy & J. House, Renoir in the Barnes Foundation, New Haven & London, 2012, p. 263). The still-lifes he created during this period were, for the most part, simply staged, typically concentrating on a vase and flowers atop an empty table. Focusing the eye on the arrangement alone, Renoir imbued these humble, everyday objects with a sense of grandeur and monumentality, allowing them to fill the entire canvas, with some flowers even disappearing beyond the edges of the painting.
Although Renoir was not the avid gardener that Claude Monet was, his corpus of floral still-lifes nonetheless showcases a broad range of blooms, often including roses, peonies, lilacs, gladioli, anemones and geraniums in their arrangements. According to 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). Here, the artist focuses on a beautifully balanced bouquet of delicate roses with their swirling petals, colours ranging from soft pinks to richer reds and subtle yellows surrounded by luscious green leaves. Roses of pink, cream, and yellow appear frequently in Renoir’s later paintings, tucked behind the ear of a female model, clutched to a breast, or occupying the decorative ambient space of a composition. “The rhymes and echoes between the objects,” John House was written, “create a series of metaphysical associations; no one object is simply equated with another, but all become part of a single chain of connections: the physical splendour of young women; the richness of materials and gilded surfaces; the lavishness of flowers… Painting becomes a vehicle for suggesting the correspondence of the senses” (quoted in Renoir, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 1985, p. 290). The neat, impactful composition of Vase de Roses with its dynamic brush strokes reaching the canvas edges exudes and evokes a sense of harmony and joy – an intimate and poignant example of Renoir’s later still-lifes. This work, previously in the collection of renowned Surrealist patron Claude Hersaint, has resided in the same private collection since the early 1960s, and is presented here at auction for the very first time in its history.