Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Galerie Paul Pétridès, Paris
Acquired from the above in 1965

Ambroise Vollard, Tableaux, pastels et dessins de Pierre-Auguste Renoir, vol. I, Paris, 1918, no. 448, illustrated p. 113
Guy-Patrice & Michel Dauberville, Renoir, Catalogue raisonné des tableaux, pastels, dessins et aquarelles, 1895-1902, vol. IV, Paris, 2012, no. 3272, illustrated p. 348

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“In Renoir’s figure painting, portraiture deserves a place unto itself. For no other artist has looked so deeply into his sitter’s soul, nor captured its essence with such economy,” (Georges Rivière quoted in Colin B. Bailey, Renoir’s Portraits: Impressions of an Age (exhibition catalogue), National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 1997-98, p. 1).

Renoir’s portraiture became a more private undertaking after 1890 when commissioned portraits became harder to come by. Rather than travelling to his clients' residence, the artist more frequently painted family members or close friends within the comfort of his own home, the intimacy of which is evident in his later portraiture techniques.

An inherently intimate art form, portraiture had an even greater emotional and artistic affinity for the Impressionists who used it as a medium to explore psychological terrain by using expressive color palettes and positioning their sitters in manners that greatly departed from their predecessors. The strictures of traditional portrait poses were ruled by the laws of decorum, and in true Impressionist fashion Renoir has subverted these notions by capturing his model as she undresses. 

In the present work, Renoir captures the beauty and delicacy of his young model with tenderness and affection. The woman is resplendent in her white gown, which is painted with thick impastos of white paint to create crispness and tangibility that contrast with the smoothness of her skin and sleek strands of hair. As Edmond Renoir once said, “When he paints a portrait he asks his model to behave normally, to sit as she usually sits, to dress as she usually dresses, so that nothing smacks of constraint or artificial preparation” (quoted in ibid., p. 20).