Bouquet de Chrysanthèmes

By 1884 Renoir was quietly at war with himself. He had built his name on soft, flickering Impressionist light, but a recent trip to Italy, where he studied Raphael, had left him convinced he had never really learned to draw, and he was straining to tighten everything up. Flowers were his escape from that pressure. He said he could throw color around on a bouquet without fear, because if he wrecked it he had lost nothing, while ruining a portrait was a catastrophe. So this is a relaxed experiment. A single kind of flower, chrysanthemums, in a plain vase, with the same restless swirling stroke running through petals, wall, and tabletop alike. The bouquet later belonged to a Rouen coal merchant who loved the Impressionists, and it has hung in his city's museum since 1909.