Tradition in Still Life Painting: It is evident from his work that Renoir, who grew up in Paris near the Musée du Louvre, was aware of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French and Dutch flower painting. When the Impressionists took up this sub-genre of still life, they were contributing to a centuries-old tradition. The essential difference between traditional still lifes and those of the Impressionists is that, until the nineteenth century, flowers and fruit from various seasons often appeared in the same composition (because model books and especially watercolors [see Jacob Marrel's study of tulips, ca. 1635–45, The Met
68.66] were customarily employed as sources of reference). By contrast, the Impressionists worked before the motif and, in general, painted only real, seasonal plant material. A magnificent early still life by Renoir with a traditional composition is
Spring Bouquet: a mixture of flowers in a blue-and-white vase on a stone ledge or shelf (Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Mass., 1943.277). In the year it was painted, 1866,
Spring Bouquet was acquired by Charles Le Cœur, an architect then in his mid-thirties and a friend and patron of the artist. Renoir thus learned early on in his career that he could achieve success and remuneration working in the genre.
The Painting: The flowers are presented in a white vase with a wide mouth and the head of an elephant on either side. (There were innumerable nineteenth-century Chinese vases with elephant-handles, but the shapes are slender and upright, and few are white.) Renoir painted the vase twice; the other work in which it appears belongs to the Guggenheim Museum in New York (78.2514.70) and is signed and dated 1885.[1] In both, the vase stands upon a table parallel to the picture plane, and textiles with loose abstract patterns serve as backdrops; the flowers and the overall tonality are similar. In The Met's painting there is also a cloth with a narrow orange stripe, ironed but rumpled, upon which rest a single pear and nine prickly pears. The arrangement of the fruit is reminiscent of still lifes by Paul Cézanne, a friend of Renoir’s and an artist whose work he greatly admired.
The two still lifes center on an abundance of chrysanthemums, an ordinary autumn garden flower found in many shades of bronze, some with a rosy tint. Prickly pears, which in France are called
figues de Barbarie, are rarely depicted. The season for the sweet edible prickly pear fruit (the plant is in fact a cactus and technically the “fruit” is a berry) is from September to December. It is native to Mexico and grows only in an arid environment, suggesting the south of France. Renoir and his family—by this time Aline Charigot had given birth to their first child—spent much of September and October 1885 in the country at Essoyes, a village well south and east of Paris, far away from the coast. If Renoir did not visit the Mediterranean in autumn 1885, and there does not seem to be any evidence that he did, then it is likely that he bought the prickly pears in a Paris market, attracted by their oval shapes and the variety and subtlety of their coloring, which ranges from green to yellow and red, shading to pink and purple. The flowers and the fruit were, in any event, available at the same time. In the Guggenheim picture, the inclusion with the chrysanthemums of a single Crown Imperial and one red-and-white variegated tulip is anomalous, as both bloom in the spring. Renoir seems never to have painted prickly pears again.
Katharine Baetjer 2021
1. See Barnett, 1978, p. 191, no. 70, ill. The Guggenheim still life belonged to Renoir’s friend the painter Jacques-Emile Blanche.
