"For an artist enamoured with colour, flowers provide a perfect subject - infinitely varied, maleable to any arrangement. Several of Renoir's most beautiful paintings...are flower pieces...Flowers appear frequently in his paintings as hat decorations or as part of the landscape behind figures even when they are not the main motif. Renoir himself said that when painting flowers he was able to paint more freely and boldly, without the mental effort he made with a model before him." (Renoir, A Retrospective, Nagoya City Art Museum, 1988, p. 247). In his still-lifes Renoir could concentrate purely on the colouristic and formal concerns, he told Albert André: "I just let my brain rest when I paint flowers...When I am painting flowers, I establish the tones, I study the values carefully, without worrying about losing the picture...The experience I gain in these works, I eventually apply to my [figure] pictures." (W. Gaunt, Renoir, Oxford, 1982, p. 32).

"Les Pivoines is painted in a rich impasto, with the most brilliant of colours, handled like a mosaic, with the colours dragged to produce a richly textured surface. The eye level focuses at the picture frame behind the top of the flowers, and the painting of which the bottom fragment is visible seems to be The Young Girl at the Piano in the Art Institute of Chicago. The vase which holds the peonies is of Japanese style, and dominates the tiny (and unseen) guéridon on which it is set, for another bunch of flowers to lie in front of the vase. The wall is a symphony of lavender with rich blues, mauves and citron tones worked into it. It is not possible to tell if the wall was covered in a watered silk of a mauve cast, or, more probably, if the wall was Renoir's favourite cool grey. As the picture represents only a shallow volume of space, the emphasis is on the ornamentation of the canvas itself. The painting shows that the artist had much in common with Monet at the same time." (Paintings by Renoir, exh. cat., The Art Institute of Chicago, 1973, p. 23)