Bunch of roses

Pierre-Auguste Renoir's 'Bunch of Roses' (1900) is a late still life from the painter who found in the rose the perfect embodiment of his commitment to sensuous beauty, chromatic richness, and the celebration of the natural world's abundant pleasures. His rose paintings became increasingly liberated from exact botanical description as his late style developed, the flowers rendered as vehicles for pure coloristic pleasure — the reds, pinks, and whites of the rose bouquet given the most painterly and sensuous treatment that his aging hands could produce.

Renoir renders the roses with his characteristic late-period freedom — the flowers' specific forms somewhat dissolved in the richness of the paint handling, the color relationships between different rose tones creating the composition's primary formal interest. His brushwork in late flower subjects achieved a quality of spontaneous abundance that matched the flowers' own natural exuberance. The warm palette — the pinks, reds, and cream whites of his rose subjects — created the chromatic richness he sought.