Peonies

Around 1880 Renoir was pulling away from the pure open-air landscapes he'd made beside Monet, and he kept turning to flowers instead. He told a friend that painting flowers rested his brain: no sitter to flatter, no patron watching, just colour. That freedom is what you are looking at here. The reds and pinks of the peonies are piled on thick and loose, and against the dark ground the blooms throw faint blue shadows across the pale cloth. Peonies flower for only a week or two in early summer, and he seems to have caught these fast, before they dropped. That dark background was his device in these years, pushing the warm flowers forward toward the viewer.