Picking Flowers

The summer of 1875 was among the most productive and also most financially precarious of Renoir's career: the Impressionist auction at the Hôtel Drouot in March had been a public failure, with paintings selling at derisory prices and the crowd openly hostile. Renoir responded by producing prolifically, and the outdoor figure paintings of this year — women in gardens, figures in fields, picnickers on riverbanks — represent both a continued artistic conviction and a commercial strategy, these works being more accessible than the movement's pure landscape subjects. Picking Flowers at the National Gallery of Art shows a woman stooping in an open field, the flowers she gathers corresponding to the dabs of bright colour in which Renoir renders them: red poppies, white daisies, yellow ranunculus. The relationship to Monet's contemporaneous figure-in-landscape paintings is close but distinct — where Monet was increasingly interested in the dissolution of the figure into its light environment, Renoir maintained the figure's physical and social presence as the primary subject. The NGA's collection includes multiple Renoir works from this period that allow the sustained outdoor figure subject to be seen as the coherent pictorial programme it was rather than a series of isolated images.

Renoir applies paint in loose, varied strokes that unify figure and landscape through a shared flickering quality of light. Flowers are dabs of bright colour against a cooler green field, while the woman's dress is built with broader sweeping strokes.