Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Galerie Paul Pétridès, Paris
Private Collection, United States

Ambroise Vollard, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paintings, Pastels and Drawings, San Francisco, 1989, no. 311, illustrated p. 78

Pierre-Auguste Renoir and portraiture are synonymous.  Of all the Impressionist painters, only Renoir has the distinction of having been a professional portrait painter.  Renoir's portraits were not limited to his bourgeois patrons.  On the contrary, the artist was keen to capture the likenesses of his fellow artists, bohemian friends, peasants and other "anonymous" sitters.  However, of all his subjects, Renoir delighted in depicting the female form; he stated that he had become an artist in order to paint women.  John House states, "It was by his representation of women that Renoir wanted his powers as a painter to be assessed.    In the early 1890s [Renoir] commented that 'in literature as in painting, talent is shown only by treatment of the feminine figures'" (John House, Renoir, (exhibition catalogue) New York, 1985, p. 16).

In the present work, the sitter is most likely a model and not a society figure.  Renoir was interested in depicting women as idealized portrayals of beauty.  Renoir's fascination with eighteenth century French art was also rooted in the work of Jean-Antoine Watteau who mastered the use of pastel.  Renoir experimented with pastel as early as 1872, but it was not until the 1880s that the artist used the medium regularly.  Unlike oil, pastel has an ethereal quality, evident in the present work. The spontaneity of the artist's hand still resonates over Tête de jeune fille.

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