Mazzo di fiori

Renoir was around 60 when he painted this, just after 1900, and his hands were already going. The rheumatism that would eventually lock his fingers had set in during the 1890s and he had begun wintering in the south for the warmth. He said flowers were what he painted to rest. On a bouquet he could set down tones and try values boldly without the fear of spoiling that a face or a body brought with it, and what he worked out there went back into the figures. Paul Guillaume owned it, then Domenica Walter, and the Louvre bought it from her in 1963. Poppies and roses are pushed into a green pot against a blue ground, on a canvas barely 40 centimetres tall.