Bouquet of Chrysanthemums

1881 was the year Renoir kept leaving. In the spring he sailed for Algeria, after the light Delacroix had gone looking for 50 years before him. In the autumn he went to Italy, saw Raphael in Rome and the ancient wall paintings at Pompeii, and came back convinced his own drawing was not good enough, which pushed his work in a harder and cooler direction for most of the 1880s. He had also stopped showing with the Impressionists by then, holding out for the official Salon instead. Flowers were where he let himself off the hook. He told the writer Georges Rivière that with flowers he felt free to try out tones and values without fear of wrecking the canvas, and that he would never take that risk in a figure painting.