Bouquet de printemps

Renoir was 25 in 1866 and had very little money. He had started out at 13 painting flowers onto porcelain in a Paris workshop, a trade that collapsed when printing machines took it over, so the bouquet was a subject he already knew how to build. It was also the standard test set for a young French painter, a chance to show handling with nothing in the subject to argue about, and the scale here is borrowed from Dutch still life rather than from a decorator's panel. He sold this one the same year to Charles Le Coeur, an architect whose family went on buying his work through the late 1860s. It came to Harvard in 1943 with the bequest of Grenville Winthrop, under terms, still binding, that it may never be lent.