Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Private Collection, France (acquired during the 1920s or 1930s)
Thence by descent to the present owner

Ambroise Vollard, Tableaux, Pastels & Dessins de Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paris, 1918, vol. I, no. 462, illustrated p. 116 (titled Tête de femme)

The canvas is lined. There do not appear to be any signs of retouching visible under UV light. There are two artist's pinholes to each of the four corners. Otherwise this work is in overall very good condition. Colours: overall fairly accurate in the printed catalogue, though the pinks are slightly more subtle in the original.
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Femme au chapeau exemplifies the warm palette and spontaneous brushwork that characterised much of Renoir's most successful mature work. As the leading portraitist of the Impressionist painters, Renoir received a great number of commissions during the 1880s and 1890s which enabled him to develop the legendary style for which he is known. The models for these portraits were often his wife, Aline, and his children's nursemaid, Gabrielle Renard, but he would also paint other less recognisable members of his circle, often fashioning them with a prominent accessory. In the present work, Renoir depicts one of his sitters wearing a hat, and indeed hats were of particular interest to the artist. Suzanne Valadon, who served as a model for some of these compositions, claimed that the artist had headpieces specially made for his models, and indeed they were commonly seen laying about his studio. One of his favourite models of this period, Gabrielle, was portrayed repeatedly in these elaborate hats and her oft-captured beauty may have inspired the present work. Albert André remembered entering one of Renoir's studios, and seeing this colourful sight: ‘His studios, whether in Paris or in the country, are empty of any furniture that might encourage visitors to stay for long. A broken down divan, covered in clothes and old flowered hats for his models; a few chairs that are always cluttered with canvases’ (Albert André, Renoir, 1919, reprinted in Renoir, A Retrospective, New York, 1987, p. 262).

‘Portraiture occupied Renoir at all stages of his early and middle career, from the dour and respectable effigies of family members painted in the 1860s, often surprisingly Victorian in feeling, to the extravagantly brushed canvases of the Impressionist decade, to the more solidly modelled, but no less brightly coloured, transitional works of the mid-1880s. During the last thirty years of his life, Renoir returned to the genre intermittently. In old age, his forms become more ample and his colors more generalized, but the artist touches new depths of affection and tenderness, and is capable of unexpected humor and wit’ (Colin B. Bailey, ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Portrait Painter,’ in Renoir's Portraits, Impressionist of an Age, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; The Art Institute of Chicago and Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth (exhibition catalogue), 1997, p. 3).