Grenier – Lilac Bouquet

Albert Grenier

(1858 Neuilly-sur-Seine-1925 Paris)

LILAC BOUQUET

Oil on canvas

73 x 54 cm

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

Flower still lifes are a major classic of art history – hardly any artist has not attempted them. At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, they often served to experiment with composition, color distribution, and simplification of forms, usually with great results. Lilac bouquets were particularly popular in Impressionism due to their lush floral splendor and the intricacy of the flowers. One can think of Edouard Manet's "Lilac Bouquet" from 1882 (now in the National Gallery, Berlin) or Corinth's "Still Life with White Lilac" (1909/10, private collection in northern Germany). Grenier indulged in warm, vibrant purple for his lilac bouquet, his favorite color, which he also liked to use in his landscapes and which is one of his trademarks. The individual clusters are not depicted as finely dotted as in Manet or Corinth, but rather summarized into color fields, marking him as a painter of the early 20th century who was familiar with both Impressionism and Fauvism.

As seen in still lifes by the Nabis, such as Vuillard or Bonnard, the background presents the living environment in which the bouquet unfolds its splendor and interacts with it. It is arranged in a blue Asian vase and stands on a seemingly fragile bamboo table in front of a shelf in the recess under the stairs. References to Japonism can be recognized. The dominant colors are purple, orange, blue, and a touch of yellow, thus two complementary colors that enhance each other, harmoniously framed and bound together by the neutral gray-white of the door and stairwell. On the staircase in the upper left corner, the colors are echoed in a small painting that appears to be a landscape painting showing a shady alley in a sunny landscape, comparable to the painting we were also able to acquire (see photos).