“Vase de fleurs et fruits”

Anemones are one of the most demanding flowers to paint. Their colours — the deep crimson, the white with its dark eye, the violet-blue — are so distinct and so vivid that they resist the softening that Impressionist technique applies to almost everything else. Albert André (1869–1954) meets the challenge directly: each flower is painted with full chromatic intensity, the petals handled with a directness and confidence that makes them the luminous centre of a composition of considerable sophistication. Around them, the painting opens into a world of carefully observed relationships. The white vase with its small painted flowers. The pink cloth on the table top, its folds handled in broad, assured strokes. The dark wooden bowl with its apples — red and green, the colours answering the anemones across the composition. The gold frame of the mirror behind, and within it a glimpse of another painting or another room. The pale wallpaper with its pattern. Everything is placed with the intelligence of a painter who has spent decades understanding how objects relate to each other in light. André was one of Renoir's closest friends. He first met him in 1894 and their friendship lasted until Renoir's death in 1919 — André visiting him regularly at Cagnes-sur-Mer, painting alongside him, eventually writing the first monograph on his work. Renoir trusted him completely: it was André who managed the master's studio in his final years when arthritis had made painting almost impossible. That proximity to one of the greatest colourists in the history of French painting is visible in works like this — in the warmth of the palette, the quality of light, the understanding of how flowers and domestic objects can be the occasion for painting of the highest order. The provenance of this work is exceptional. It passed through Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris — the gallery that represented Monet, Renoir, Pissarro and Sisley and that defined Impressionism's relationship with the market — under stock number 12185, before entering the collection of Arthur G. Altschul in the United States, one of the most distinguished American collections of French art of the twentieth century.