Girl with Spikes - Girl with Flowers

Pierre-Auguste Renoir's 1888 canvas of a girl with flower spikes belongs to his mature period following his self-described 'crisis' of the early 1880s, during which he had rejected Impressionism in favor of a more classically drawn figure style. By 1888 he had found a synthesis between his Impressionist color instincts and the structural solidity he had sought in Ingres and the Italian masters, and works like this one show the relaxed beauty of that resolution. The combination of a figure with flowers was a recurrent subject in Renoir's work, uniting his two great pleasures — the human form and the natural world.

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.