Lily and Greenhouse Plants

Renoir was 23 in 1864 and only starting out, and a still life more than a metre and a quarter tall was an ambitious thing to take on. He painted a corner of a greenhouse, pots of flowers on low staging with a white arum lily rising on a tall stem through the middle. He painted a second version of the same greenhouse corner, which is now in the Hamburger Kunsthalle. This one had a German life before it reached Winterthur. The Bremen collector Leopold Biermann bought it in 1909, in close consultation with Gustav Pauli, the director of the Kunsthalle Bremen, and planned to leave his whole collection to the city’s art society. After the First World War and the inflation that followed, he changed his mind, and his widow sold the picture to the Swiss collector Oskar Reinhart. In 2023 the Bremen museum borrowed it for its anniversary exhibition and hung it beside Monet’s Camille and Manet’s portrait of the sculptor Zacharie Astruc, three early works by painters later grouped with the Impressionists.