Roses and Jasmine in a Delft Vase

Roses and Jasmine in a Delft Vase of 1880 was painted at the height of Renoir's Impressionist engagement with the domestic still life, when he regularly produced floral canvases both for private pleasure and for commercial sale to the Parisian market that had proven receptive to his flower painting. The Delft vase — blue and white Dutch faience — was a fashionable collector's object in bourgeois French interiors of the 1870s and 1880s, its cool blue-white contrasting naturally with the warm pinks and whites of roses and the white-and-yellow of jasmine. The combination of two flower types with the decorative vase created multiple levels of chromatic and textural interest: the large, layered rose heads against the small star-shaped jasmine flowers, the organic curves of both against the geometric Chinese-influenced patterns of the Delft vessel. Renoir's 1880 floral canvases are among his most confidently Impressionist — freely brushed, luminously colored, capturing the freshness of cut flowers before they wilt — and this Barnes Foundation canvas, with its particularly rich combination of flowers and significant vessel, represents one of his finest examples of the genre.

Renoir renders the flower arrangement without the tight outlines of academic still life painting, instead allowing adjacent colors to interpenetrate at the boundaries between blooms. The Delft vase's blue and white decoration provides a geometric foil to the organic complexity of the flowers above. His brushwork in flower painting tends to be even more gestural than in his figure work, using rapid, confident strokes that capture the characteristic form of each bloom without laboring over individual petals.