Coleção privada
OST - 55x46 - 1895
A timeless and
lyrical idyll, Femme se coiffant au bord de la mer comes to the
market for the first time in nearly a century from the illustrious Booth family
collection. In 1927, notable collector and patron of the arts Ralph Harman
Booth acquired the work from Bernheim-Jeune, one of
the longest-standing and most renowned dealers to first champion
Impressionist and Modern masters including Renoir, van Gogh, Bonnard and
Vuillard, and the present canvas is captured in a photograph of
Bernheim-Jeune's salon.
While Renoir’s
bathing scenes of the mid-1880s present crisp lines and fresco-like renderings
of his subjects inspired by Ingres, “by the 1890s, Renoir’s hard-edged style
yielded to a fluid melding of figure and ground, and particularities gave way
to a more generalized and idealized approach”. Dated circa 1895, Femme
se coiffant au bord de la mer presents a brilliant encapsulation of an
Arcadian-inspired reverie painted with the hallmark brushstrokes and effulgent
light of the Impressionists. Émile Verhaeren, a contemporary poet and art
critic of Renoir, highlighted the quality of Renoir's specific handling of
flesh: "Here...is an utterly new vision, a quite unexpected interpretation
of reality to solicit our imagination. Nothing is fresher, more alive and
pulsating with blood and sexuality, than these bodies and faces as he portrays
them. Where have they come from, those light and vibrating tones that
caress arms, necks, and shoulders, and give a sensation of soft flesh and
porousness?”.
A similar work
recently lent to the Musée Renoir in Cagnes-sur-Mer by Prince Albert II of
Monaco and dated five years earlier highlights an important quality in Renoir’s
painting from this period—the inconsequence of location. While the central
figure, pose, and drapery in the two works echo each other, the present
composition is set along a cerulean seaside, replacing the wooded promontory of
the earlier picture. As Verhaeren states, “the backgrounds are suffusions of
air and light; they are vague because they must not distract us".
John House
writes the following on Renoir's fascination with the subject of the female
nude in outdoor settings: "On his travels Renoir painted many landscapes
and informal outdoor subjects, but his more serious efforts were reserved for
themes which tread the borderline between everyday life and idyll-themes with
obvious echoes of eighteenth-century art. He painted a long series of nudes,
mainly young girls in outdoor settings, whom in a letter he called his
'nymphs.' Mainly single figures at first, he brought them together in groups
around 1897 in several pictures of girls playing which translate the subject of
the 1887 Bathers into a fluent informality very reminiscent of
Fragonard's Bathers”.
This obsession
would remain constant throughout the artist’s career, eventually building to
his final canvases; the iconic Rubensian compositions of nude bathers rendered
in luminous washes of pink and gold. The recent exhibition at The Clark Art
Institute, Renoir: The Body, The Senses, surveyed the evolution
of the artist's figural works, featuring earlier paintings like Blonde
Bather which match the quality and tenor of the present
composition. “It was by his images of women that Renoir wished to be judged as
an artist… His late works, in which the resplendent nudes represent a mythical
ideal of woman, fused with the earthly paradise that Renoir always sought, are
a fitting final testament”.
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário