Flowers in a Green Vase c. 1912

Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted ‘Flowers in a Green Vase’ with oil on canvas, and when you look at it, it is just a mass of marks making up the form. The textures in this painting are just lovely, I really like the way that the brushstrokes seem to dance across the canvas, creating a sense of movement and vitality. The way he handles the paint is quite luscious, the colors are soft and warm, there's a real tenderness to it. If you zoom in on the roses, you can see how Renoir builds up the petals with these short, staccato strokes of pink and red. It's almost as if he's sculpting the flowers with paint, giving them a real sense of volume and depth. And the way he contrasts the soft, rounded forms of the flowers with the sharp, angular lines of the vase is really striking. It reminds me a little of Manet, he really knew how to make paint sing, didn't he?