Girl with Spikes - Girl with Flowers

The 1888 canvas of a girl with flower spikes at the São Paulo Museum of Art belongs to the year immediately following the Large Bathers, when Renoir was emerging from his most sustained formal experiment with a new confidence and a new synthesis. The Ingresque crisis had taught him that his Impressionist practice needed greater structural awareness, and by 1888 he had found the synthesis he was seeking: a figure style that maintained Impressionist colour and atmospheric warmth while achieving the volume and definition he had lacked, in his own critical view, in his 1870s work. The girl-with-flowers subject was one of his most naturally fluent, combining his two great pictorial pleasures — the female figure and natural botanical abundance — in a composition that required no narrative pretext or social context beyond the simple pleasure of a young woman among flowers. The São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP) holds one of the finest collections of European painting in Latin America, and its Renoir holdings document the global dispersal of his work through the dealer network that Durand-Ruel in particular established in the last decades of the nineteenth century.

Renoir renders the girl with his characteristic warmth of color and softness of touch — the skin glowing with warm pinks and creams, the flowers rendered in varied, lively strokes. The handling is gentler and more resolved than his early Impressionist work, with greater attention to the modeling of the figure while retaining colorist vitality.