Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Roux de Billencourt, France
Sale: Hotel Drouot, Paris, November 25, 1898, lot 56
Durand-Ruel, Paris (acquired at the above sale)
M. Furstenberg, Paris (acquired from the above on April 25, 1914)
Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris
Wildenstein & Co., Paris and New York
Sam Salz, New York (acquired from the above in 1950)
Private Collection, New York
François Daulte, Paris
Acquired from the above on June 8th, 1989

Exposition de la Société Artistique de Roubaix-Tourcoing, 1910
Munich, Exposition d'art Musulman, 1910
London, International Society of Sculptors, Painters, Engravers, 1912
Frankfurt, Exhibition of the Frankfurter Kunstverein, 1912
New York, Wildenstein & Co., French Portraits of the 19th Century, 1948, no. 13

François Daulte, Auguste Renoir:  Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre peint, Figures 1860-1890, Lausanne, 1971, vol. 1, no. 98, illustrated
Elda Fezzi, L'Opera completa di Renoir nel periodo impresionista 1869-1883, Milan, 1972, no. 109, illustrated p. 94

Executed in 1873, this work probably depicts the wife of Claude Monet, née Camille Léonie Doncieux (1847-1879).  Camille came from a modest bourgeois family that had moved to Paris when she was eight years old.  Having been his companion and model since the age of eighteen, she married Monet in Paris on June 28th, 1870.  Although Monet's family was originally opposed to this marriage, Camille proved to be a devoted companion, sat for many of his paintings, and accompanied him on trips to London and Amsterdam in the early 1870s.  They had two sons:  Jean, born in 1867 and Michel, born in 1878.

Renoir visited Monet's house in Argenteuil several times, and during his visits he often painted the artist's wife, either alone, or with her son Jean.  Renoir spent the summer of 1873 in Argentueil, when the present work was painted, alongside the larger Madame Claude Monet lisant, now in the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts (Fig. 1).  Paintings such as Jeune femme en blanc lisant anticipated a whole sub-genre of aesthetic interiors with fashionable Parisians reclining or reading, painted in the years to follow.  Renoir's depiction of the decorative pattern of the sofa is testament to the increasing influence of Japanese art in his paintings of this period.

 

Fig. 1 Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Madame Claude Monet lisant, 1872, oil on canvas, The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts