Bouquet of Chrysanthemums, 1881. Auguste Renoir. Oil on canvas. The Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg Collection, Bequest of Walter H. Annenberg, 2002.
Renoir felt that he had greater freedom to experiment in still lifes than in figure paintings. "When I paint flowers, I feel free to try out tones and values and worry less about destroying the canvas," he told the writer Georges Rivière. "I would not do this with a figure painting since there I would care about destroying the work."