What seems to me most significant about our movement [Impressionism] is that we have freed painting from the importance of the subject. I am at liberty to paint flowers and call them flowers, without their needing to tell a story.
Vase de roses is an exquisite example of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s still-life paintings. The artist returned to this subject throughout his career for the technical freedom it afforded; unbound by a portrait sitter's expectations or a landscape's unpredictable nature, Renoir could experiment freely within the genre of still life, particularly in his depictions of colorful flowers. As noted in the 1988 catalogue for one of Renoir's many retrospective exhibitions, “for an artist enamored with color, flowers provide a perfect subject—infinitely varied, malleable to any arrangement. Several of Renoir's most beautiful paintings are indeed depictions of flowers: as still lifes, adorning portraits, embedded in landscapes. 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” (Exh. Cat., Nagoya, Nagoya City Art Museum, Renoir Retrospective, 1988, p. 247). Appearing at auction for the first t.mes , Vase de roses is an exceptional product of Renoir's experimentation within the genre.
This still life is a tour de force of Renoir's sensuous facture. His exuberant brushwork imbues the canvas with palpable energy, yet he lingers on certain passages to tenderly illustrate the flowers’ delicacy, even ephemerality. His gentle touch conveys not just color and form, but the subtle effects of dappled light on various textures. Renoir is known more than anything as a master of capturing light, and here the canvas is luminous.
The vase itself is decorated with flowers that echo the brilliant colors of the roses that overflow it. This jewel-like vase is perhaps a nod to Renoir’s apprenticeship as a porcelain painter with the Lévy Brothers, and it is executed with just as much care as the rest of the composition. The distinctions between roses, vase and background are not immediately evident, especially given the background is a near-abstraction of rosy hues. The absence of distinct differentiation between foreground and background recalls the work of Renoir’s contemporary Paul Cézanne, who pioneered the idea of flattening perspective to a single plane (fig. 1). The compositional complexities applied to such a simple subject in Vase de roses exemplifies Renoir's evocation of beauty in the quotidian.
Renoir's bouquets in Museum collects ions
Jos Hessel, cousin of Renoir’s dealers Josse and Gaston Bernheim-Jeune, likely acquired Vase de roses directly from the artist in the early 1900s. Hessel and his wife Jeanne (who preferred to go by the name Lucy) were major collects
ors of Impressionist art and became close friends with Édouard Vuillard, for whom Hessel became an exclusive dealer. At the turn of the twentieth century, Hessel joined his cousins' gallery, eventually managing their location on Avenue de l'Opéra. After his passing, his adopted daughter Lulu Kléné, who later married Jacques Arpels of the Van Cleef & Arpels jewelry family, inherited the work.