Pierre Bracquemond painting a bouquet of flowers

In this sensitive rendering, Marie Bracquemond's son Pierre practices his painting — a still life. Pierre would have been 17 at the time of this painting. Just three years later, Marie would give up painting professionally, a bitter sacrifice motivated by her husband Felix Bracquemond. Felix was also a painter, who Pierre described as growing incresingly bitter over his wife's success with the Salon. In 1919, three years after his mother's death, Pierre would hold a retrospective of his mother's work at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune. He held no such retrospective for his father.