Jovem com Chapéu de Palha (Jeune Femme au Chapeau de Paille) - Pierre Auguste Renoir

Jovem com Chapéu de Palha (Jeune Femme au Chapeau de Paille) - Pierre Auguste Renoir
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OST - 56x46 - Circa 1890

Painted circa 1890, Jeune femme au chapeau de paille depicts a young girl in profile, shown against a neutral setting, her formal pose and dress suggesting that she sat for the painter. By the time he executed the present work, Renoir was a well established artist, who no longer had a financial need to paint commissioned portraits, and was able to focus on more intimate depictions of his friends and family members. Despite the girl’s formal appearance in this work, the artist’s focus on her face and his omission of any descriptive details of her surroundings create an intimate atmosphere.  

At the time the present work was painted, Renoir was renowned as the finest portraitist of the Impressionist circle. His portraits of young women, most famously of Gabrielle, who would become his favourite model several years later, received overwhelming praise by his contemporaries and were admired for their sweet docility and sensual, albeit innocent, allure. In its elegance and suppleness, Jeune femme au chapeau de paille is an accomplished example of Renoir’s portraiture, capturing the beauty of the sitter with a sense of grace and serenity. Portrayed in profile, the sitter is shown alone and self-absorbed, seemingly unaware of being watched and painted. Renoir used a palette of soft colours to render the woman’s robed bust and hat and for the monochrome background, contrasting them with the warm glow of her face and her bright hair and lips.

The present work adopts Renoir’s most favoured compositional format, that which shows the figure in half-length, in profile view and looking out from the picture plane. Fascinated by the artist’s exquisite rendering of female portraits, Théodore Duret remarked: ‘Renoir excels at portraits. Not only does he catch the external features, but through them he pinpoints the model’s character and inner self. I doubt whether any painter has ever interpreted woman in a more seductive manner. The deft and lively touches of Renoir’s brush are charming, supple and unrestrained, making flesh transparent and tinting the cheeks and lips with a perfect living hue. Renoir’s women are enchantresses’ (T. Duret, reprinted in Histoire des peintres impressionnistes, Paris, 1922, pp. 27-28).

Jeune femme au chapeau de paille is a beautiful example of this transitional period in Renoir’s art, when he was moving away from the classic Impressionist style of the previous decades, and found a new source of inspiration in painters such as Titian and Rubens. Whilst very conscious of the achievements of the Old Masters, he continued to stress the role of spontaneity in his art. Walter Pach, the American painter and writer, visited Renoir in Cagnes at a later stage of the artist’s career and asked him: ‘When you have laid in the first tones, do you know, for example, which others must follow? Do you know to what extent a red or a green must be introduced to secure your effect?’ Renoir replied: ‘No I don't; that is the procedure of an apothecary, not of an artist. I arrange my subject as I want it, then I go ahead and paint it, just like a child. I want a red to be sonorous, to sound like a bell; if it doesn't turn out that way, I put more reds or other colours till I get it. [...] there are myriads of tiny tints. I must find the ones that will make the flesh on my canvas live and quiver’ (W. Pach, Queer Thing Painting, 1938, reprinted in Nicholas Wadley (ed.), Renoir. A Retrospective, New York, 1987, p. 244).

Renoir’s portraits and domestic interiors provided inspiration to the generation of avant-garde artists that followed, including Bonnard and Matisse. Picasso’s neo-Classical paintings from the early 1920s owe much to his admiration for Renoir, whose paintings he encountered primarily through the dealer Paul Rosenberg. The influence of Renoir’s style on Picasso is apparent in the voluminous, yet elegant neo-classical figures in compositions such as Femme au chapeau blanc.

For over four decades the present work was in the collection of Colonel & Mrs Jack L. Warner, who lived in Beverley Hills. Jack Leonard Warner (1892-1978) was a Canadian-born American film producer; he was one of the four founders and the long serving president of Warner Bros. Studios in Hollywood. Warner acquired Jeune femme au chapeau de paille in the early 1940s and after his death in 1978 it remained in the possession of his widow Anne Page Warner. After Mrs Warner’s death in 1990, the work was sold at auction in New York.