Pierre-Auguste Renoir - Spring Bouquet Socks

Spring Bouquet (Bouquet de printemps), 1866 - Pierre-Auguste Renoir, oil on canvas. Pierre-Auguste Renoir (Limoges, 1841 - Cagnes-sur-Mer, 1919) was a French Impressionist painter. Renoir painted this ambitious flower piece early in his career. The exuberant bouquet in a Japanese vase fills a large canvas, recalling the scale of Dutch still life, while the textures of the arrangement evoke Watteau and Boucher, whom he had studied as a young porcelain painter. Instead of the palette knife borrowed from Courbet, he adopted a freer, thinner stroke with the brush alone, a step towards the style he would soon explore with Monet, Sisley and Bazille. Renoir returned to flowers throughout his life, so this work is a valuable early reference for a subject that accompanied nearly his entire career.