Vase of Flowers c. 1889

Curator: Oh, this is "Vase of Flowers," painted by Pierre-Auguste Renoir around 1889. It's oil on canvas. Editor: It feels almost like a fever dream! Such a haze of colors and shapes...I feel slightly seasick just looking at it. Beautifully so, of course. There's a lovely weightlessness, a real generosity of spirit. Curator: Generosity, yes, I see that. For me, the image is all about abundance. A celebration of the senses. Flowers, of course, are traditionally symbolic, and in a vanitas context... Editor: ...often symbolizing the brevity of life, yes. But Renoir feels different, doesn't he? This isn’t so much a memento mori as it is a "memento vivere!" It seems like an emphatic demand, maybe? Fill your senses. Drink it in. Curator: Perhaps that vivid, almost haphazard, arrangement in that rather utilitarian, bright-blue jug emphasizes your feeling, in that you see it as something less controlled? It’s far from a formal, classical still life, wouldn't you agree? There is the domestic with the divine in it.. Editor: Exactly! That clash of refined and commonplace gives it that lively, modern charge. Flowers erupting out of a simple blue pitcher—like an ecstatic secret bursting from the mundane. Then again, blue itself carries its weight as well as the divine and is sometimes seen as something heavenly and rare. I keep wondering where did he get it, was it something close by? Did someone give it to him? I have more questions than usual. Curator: And what of the symbolism of particular flowers themselves? What can they tell us? Well, given how indistinct many of them are it would be something difficult, in a way it challenges me but what would Renoir tell us himself? Would it fit with our own take? It can make anyone a little anxious at least to me... Editor: And yet that haziness makes it more real somehow, doesn't it? More immediate. Most of us don't see the world with hyper-crisp definition, not when we're overcome by emotion. Curator: A lovely thought. Overall it presents quite an engaging tension doesn’t it? Editor: Yes. I come away wanting to make a bouquet of my own. Maybe some from my garden and a few found from the local market or a walk outside!