Grenier – Bouquet of Lilacs

Albert Grenier

(1858 Neuilly-sur-Seine – 1925 Paris)

BOUQUET OF LILACS

Oil on canvas

73 x 54 cm

Provenance: Estate of Albert Grenier; Lilly Grenier (née Amelie Sans) and her heirs

Floral still lifes are a great classic of art history – hardly an artist hasn't tried their hand at them. At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, they frequently served as a means to experiment with composition, color distribution, and the simplification of forms, usually with magnificent results. Bouquets of lilacs were particularly popular in Impressionism because of their lush blossoms and the intricate detail of the individual flowers. One need only think of Édouard Manet's "Bouquet of Lilacs" from 1882 (now in the National Gallery, Berlin) or Corinth's "Still Life with White Lilacs" (1909/10, private collection in northern Germany). Grenier reveled in his lilac bouquet, rendered in warm, vibrant purple, his favorite color, which he also frequently used in his landscapes and which became one of his trademarks. The individual blossoms are no longer depicted with the intricate dots found in the works of Manet or Corinth, but rather grouped into fields of color, marking him as an early 20th-century painter familiar with both Impressionism and Fauvism.

As in still lifes by the Nabis, such as those by Vuillard or Bonnard, the background depicts the domestic setting in which the bouquet unfolds its splendor and with which it interacts. It is arranged in a blue, Asian-style vase and rests on a seemingly fragile bamboo table in front of a shelf in the alcove beneath the stairs. References to Japonism are discernible. The dominant colors are purple, orange, blue, and a hint of yellow—two complementary colors that enhance each other—before being harmoniously framed and unified by the neutral grayish-white of the door and stairwell. On the upper left corner of the staircase, these colors are echoed in a small painting, which appears to be a landscape depicting a shady alley in a sunny setting, similar to the painting we were also able to acquire (see photos).