Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Estate of the artist
Arthur Tooth & Sons, Ltd., London (circa 1938)
Mrs Abram Eisenberg, New York
M. Knoedler & Co., New York
Acquavella Galleries Inc., New York
Sale: Christie's, London, 3rd July 1973, lot 22
Private Collection (purchased at the above sale)
Thence by descent to the present owner

New York, Durand-Ruel Gallery, Portraits by Renoir, 1939, no. 13
New York, Acquavella Galleries Inc., Four Masters of Impressionism, 1968, no. 60, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

Bernheim-Jeune (ed.), L'Atelier de Renoir, Paris, 1931, vol. I, no. 210, illustrated pl. 68 (titled Portrait de Jean Renoir tenant un cerceau and as dating from 1899)
Michel Florisoone, Renoir, Paris, 1937, illustrated p. 61
Charles Terrasse, Cinquante portraits de Renoir, Paris, 1941, illustrated pl. 35
Michel Drucker and Germain Bazin, Renoir, Paris, 1944, illustrated pl. 111 (titled Portrait de Jean Renoir tenant un cerceau)
François Fosca, Renoir, His Life and Work, London, 1961, illustrated p. 203 (as dating from 1899)
Elda Fezzi, L'Opera completa di Renoir, Milan, 1972, no. 696, illustrated p. 121 (as dating from 1899)
Barbara Ehrlich White, Renoir, His Life, Art and Letters, New York, 1984, mentioned p. 210

Portrait de Jean Renoir, l’enfant au cerceau is one of Renoir’s most stunning and delicate portraits of children, executed with a remarkable elegance and gracefulness. Depicting the artist’s son Jean, aged four, it dates from the summer of 1898, when Renoir was renting a châlet in Berneval. Born in Paris in September 1894, Jean was the artist’s second son, who later achieved international fame in his own right as a film director. As a child he was a model for Renoir’s numerous paintings, pastels and drawings, often depicted as a baby with the maid Gabrielle Renard, or playing and drawing as a young boy (fig. 1). Showing Jean in an elaborate costume and assuming a more formal pose, the present portrait is a testament to the artist’s affection for his son, as well as to his domestic bliss. Renoir himself evidently held this work in high esteem: it occupied a prominent space in his house (fig. 2), and was still in his possession at the time of his death.

Writing about the present work, Barbara Ehrlich describes it as ‘an elegant portrait of Jean (dressed as a girl, as was Mme. Charpentier’s son) that he proudly displayed in his home. As Julie [Manet] noted in her diary on June 16, 1898: ‘Jean’s portrait in black velvet with a lace collar and a hoop in his hand hangs in the drawing room, it looks very good, you would think it was the portrait of a little prince’’ (B. E. White, op. cit., p. 210). Renoir depicted the charming subject of a child with a hoop in other major oils, most notably in the grouping of children in Les Parapluies of 1881-85, now at the National Gallery in London, and in La Fille au cerceau (Marie Goujon) of 1885 (fig. 3). A symbol of playfulness and childhood innocence, the hoop adds a lighter note to this otherwise formal portrait of a four year old boy.

Renoir was particularly moved to paint portraits of his children before they had had their first haircut, seeking to capture them in the full bloom and innocence of childhood. In 1899, Renoir executed another portrait of Jean, that he later donated to the museum of his native Limoges, depicting the boy with a white bow in his bright red hair (fig. 4). ‘His long tresses, the ‘pure gold’ that Renoir loved to paint, had been a source of embarrassment to Jean for some time now. Boys in the street would taunt him with ‘Mademoiselle, where’s your skirt?’ and school represented salvation. As he himself noted: ‘I impatiently awaited the day when I was to enter the Collège de Sainte-Croix, where the regulations required a hairstyle more suited to my middle-class ideals’’ (Renoir’s Portraits, Impressions of an Age (exhibition catalogue), National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 1997, p. 232).

Throughout his life Renoir had lamented the lack of Medici-style patronage for artists and the loss of the system of apprenticeship. To a certain extent Jean played a role which fulfilled the artist’s longing for the dignified artistic practice of the past, both in the way he was dressed to look like a Renaissance prince and by helping in various ways in the studio. In his biography of his father, Jean recalled in some detail being both an assistant and model for his father, saying that Renoir needed ‘that state of abandon on the part of the model, which would allow him to touch the depths of human nature, freed of all cares and prejudices of the moment. […] The spirit inherent in the girls and boys, the children and trees, which filled the world he created, is as purely naked as Gabrielle’s nude body. And, last of all, in this nakedness Renoir discloses his own self’ (J. Renoir, Renoir, My Father, 1958, London, 1962, quoted in Nicholas Wadley (ed.), Renoir, A Retrospective, New York, 1987, p. 349).

Fig. 1, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Jean Renoir dessinant, 1901, oil on canvas, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond
Fig. 2, Renoir in his home in Paris, 1912 (partially showing the present work, upper left)
Fig. 3, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Fillette au cerceau (Marie Goujon), 1885, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C., Chester Dale Collection
Fig. 4, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Portrait de Jean Renoir, 1899, oil on canvas, Musée Municipal de l’Evêché, Limoges