Cartão Postal a Prova D'Água / Waterproof Postcard, Correios Subaquáticos / Underwater Post Office, Melle Bay, Vanuatu
Melle Bay - Vanuatu
Fotografia - Cartão Postal
domingo, 12 de janeiro de 2020
Cartão Postal a Prova D'Água / Waterproof Postcard, Correios Subaquáticos / Underwater Post Office, Melle Bay, Vanuatu
Cartão Postal a Prova D'Água / Waterproof Postcard, Correios Subaquáticos / Underwater Post Office, Melle Bay, Vanuatu
Melle Bay - Vanuatu
Fotografia - Cartão Postal
Cartão Postal a Prova D'Água / Waterproof Postcard, Correios Subaquáticos / Underwater Post Office, Melle Bay, Vanuatu
Cartão Postal a Prova D'Água / Waterproof Postcard, Correios Subaquáticos / Underwater Post Office, Melle Bay, Vanuatu
Melle Bay - Vanuatu
Fotografia - Cartão Postal
"Vanuatu
Post has created an official Post Office with a difference. It is the
world’s only Underwater Post
Office.. Situated within the Hideaway Island marine sanctuary, the Post
Office sits in around three metres of water and both divers and snorkellers are
able to post special 'waterproof postcards'. If snorkellers cannot duck-dive
down that far, Hideaway Island staff will be on the spot to help out. During
opening hours the cards will be cancelled/embossed by the postal staff in the
Underwater Post Office. Instead of being stamped with ink to show that the card
has been sent, the Post office has developed a new embossed cancellation
device."
Mele Island (also known by tourists as Hideaway Island) is an islet located in the bay with the same name of the Efate, the third largest island of Vanuatu. The island is owned by the local Melle villagers, but is leased to the owners of Hideaway Island Resort. The island is accessed by a boat service from nearby Port Vila (the capital and largest city of Vanuatu) and offers accommodation and watersports to visitors. Surrounded by clear turquoise water, coral reefs and thousands of fish, this Melanesian style resort is the custodian of one of Vanuatu’s only marine sanctuaries. Coral reefs ideal for snorkeling or scuba diving right from the shore are home to thousands of ‘tame’ fish.
Mele Island (also known by tourists as Hideaway Island) is an islet located in the bay with the same name of the Efate, the third largest island of Vanuatu. The island is owned by the local Melle villagers, but is leased to the owners of Hideaway Island Resort. The island is accessed by a boat service from nearby Port Vila (the capital and largest city of Vanuatu) and offers accommodation and watersports to visitors. Surrounded by clear turquoise water, coral reefs and thousands of fish, this Melanesian style resort is the custodian of one of Vanuatu’s only marine sanctuaries. Coral reefs ideal for snorkeling or scuba diving right from the shore are home to thousands of ‘tame’ fish.
Selo "Correios Subaquáticos / Underwater Post Office", Melle Bay, Vanuatu
Selo "Correios Subaquáticos / Underwater Post Office", Melle Bay, Vanuatu
Melle Bay - Vanuatu
Emissão especial de décimo aniversário
Selo
Vanuatu Post has created an official Post Office with a
difference. It is the world’s only Underwater Post Office.
Situated within the Hideaway Island marine sanctuary, the Post
Office sits in around three metres of water and both divers and snorkellers are
able to post special “waterproof postcards”. If snorkellers cannot duck-dive
down that far, Hideaway Island staff will be on the spot to help out.
During opening hours the cards will be cancelled/embossed by
the postal staff in the Underwater Post Office. Instead of being stamped with
ink to show that the card has been sent, the Post office has developed a new
embossed cancellation device.
Placed on site by Vanuatu Post, this official and currently unique postal location was approved by local Ni Vanuatu and opened for business in May 2003.
Opening hours are posted on the beach at Hideaway Island, and a special flag is raised on a float above the site when there are postal workers in the water. Some Vanuatu Post Office staff have completed their Open Water dive training at Hideaway Island.
Out of hours the post cards can be posted in the underwater post box attached to the post office or taken to the main post office in town. All are guaranteed to receive the special cancellation from this unique underwater paradise before being delivered both locally and internationally.
This new Post Office recognises that the Republic of Vanuatu’s
is made up of 83 islands and is a marine paradise. The sea is such an important
part of life in Vanuatu so in addition to opening the worlds only Underwater
Post Office, Vanuatu Post has issued a new stamp issue and minisheet featuring
snorkelling. Vanuatu was designed for snorkelling, and has countless good
snorkelling spots and a wide range of spectacular sea life. This stamp issue
follows the extremely popular eco-tourism stamp issue that featured many of the
adventure, culture, nature, sport and community activities available in
Vanuatu. Placed on site by Vanuatu Post, this official and currently unique postal location was approved by local Ni Vanuatu and opened for business in May 2003.
Opening hours are posted on the beach at Hideaway Island, and a special flag is raised on a float above the site when there are postal workers in the water. Some Vanuatu Post Office staff have completed their Open Water dive training at Hideaway Island.
Out of hours the post cards can be posted in the underwater post box attached to the post office or taken to the main post office in town. All are guaranteed to receive the special cancellation from this unique underwater paradise before being delivered both locally and internationally.
Visitors who wish to view the colourful coral gardens and the immense numbers
of tropical fish, can utilise boat tour operators that cater for snorkellers as
well as “free snorkel” from beaches and resorts around the island paradise. The
sport is accessible for both young and old and much pleasure can be had in sea
temperatures that can reach 30 degree. Thanks to Vanuatu’s Marine Park laws,
the protected healthy coral reefs and abundant and varied marine life remain
one of the Republic’s greatest natural attractions.
Vanuatu Post encourages visitors to literally look below the surface of this beautiful country and grab a mask, fins and snorkel, and visit the Underwater Post Office. They guarantee you will discover unlimited fun and unforgettable adventures!
Vanuatu Post encourages visitors to literally look below the surface of this beautiful country and grab a mask, fins and snorkel, and visit the Underwater Post Office. They guarantee you will discover unlimited fun and unforgettable adventures!
Correios Subaquáticos / Underwater Post Office, Melle Bay, Vanuatu
Correios Subaquáticos / Underwater Post Office, Melle Bay, Vanuatu
Melle Bay - Vanuatu
Fotografia
Filosofia de Internet - Humor
Filosofia de Internet - Humor
Humor
Nota do blog: Óbvio que é generalização. Mas tem o seu charme e verdade...
Filosofia de Internet - Humor
Filosofia de Internet - Humor
Humor
Nota do blog: Se você é daqueles que acha que é a empresa que deve se adaptar a você e não o contrário, continue assim (e desempregado)...rs.
Jardim Botânico Real de Kew / Kew Gardens, Perto de Uma Lagoa, Londres, Inglaterra (Jardin de Kew, Londres, Près d'un Étang) - Camille Pissarro
Jardim Botânico Real de Kew / Kew Gardens, Perto de Uma Lagoa, Londres, Inglaterra (Jardin de Kew, Londres, Près d'un Étang) - Camille Pissarro
Londres - Inglaterra
Coleção privada
OST - 46x55 - 1892
“I’m at Kew, taking advantage of this exceptional summer to
throw myself headlong into my plein air studies in this stunning
park,” Pissarro wrote to Octave Mirbeau in July 1892, brimming with enthusiasm
for his new motifs. “Dear friend, what trees! What lawns! What lovely imperceptible
undulations of the countryside! It’s a dream” (quoted in J. Pissarro and C.
Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, op. cit., 2005, p. 616).
Pissarro had arrived in London in late May, for the third of four voyages that he would take to the English capital over the course of his career. The impetus for this trip was concern for Lucien, his eldest son and most frequent correspondent, who had settled in London two years earlier. Lucien had fallen in love with a young woman named Esther Bensusan and sought her family’s blessing for their marriage. Both young people were from traditional Jewish households. Her father Jacob, however, was adamantly opposed to the union, reproaching Lucien for his career choice—he too was an artist—and his lack of religious piety. Having encountered staunch resistance from his own parents when he decided to marry Julie Vellay, Pissarro was eager to spare his son such a conflict.
Unlike many of his Impressionist colleagues, who shunned traditional marital life, Pissarro was a quintessential family man and doted on his children—eight in all, six of whom survived to adulthood. He taught them to draw and paint (with the exception of his daughter Jeanne, whom Julie insisted should have a more traditional upbringing) and assiduously nurtured their intellectual development. “He became the kind of father he never had,” Richard Brettell has written, “less a restraining force on the lives of his children than an anxiously patient guide to life” (Pissarro’s People, exh. cat., Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, 2011, p. 117). When Lucien encountered difficulties in his personal life, Pissarro did not hesitate to enter the fray. “There’s no other solution but to ask her father for her hand,” he advised his son. “I’m willing to do what’s necessary to try to secure it for you” (quoted in J. Pissarro and C. Durnad-Ruel Snollaerts, op. cit., 2005, p. 236).
On his arrival in London, Pissarro settled into the flat at 7 Colville Square in Bayswater that Lucien shared with his brother Georges. By 10 June, he had begun to paint at Kew Gardens, some five miles southwest of Bayswater in suburban Richmond; late in the month, he moved to rented quarters above a bakery at the corner of Gloucester Road and Kew Green to be closer to his motifs. “I’m trying to do my best here despite the weather’s constant variations,” he reported to Mirbeau. “The Kew Gardens are wonderful and the surrounding country is superb. But time is so short and the work to be done so long that I despair!” (quoted in ibid., p. 616).
During the ensuing two months, Pissarro painted eight large views of the lush Gardens from different angles, as well as three canvases depicting the splendid vista from his balcony over the adjacent Green. In the present painting, a group of elegantly dressed men, women, and children—out for a leisurely excursion on a splendid summer day—stroll along a grassy path that leads up a low rise in the middle distance, presumably toward the pond of the title. Reflecting Pissarro’s experimentation with Divisionist techniques during the late 1880s, the dominant blue-green hues of the canvas are heightened with accents of complementary orange, and pigment is applied in myriad tiny touches to create a disciplined, close-knit tapestry of color. The composition, however, exudes all the freedom and spontaneity of plein-air painting, with trees of varying shapes and sizes creating an irregular, gently rolling band of foliage that echoes the subtle undulations in the land and the loose pattern of wispy clouds.
“These are delightful, relaxed works,” Alan Bowness has written, “in which Camille seems to have happily returned to the manner of painting natural to him, abandoning the dogmatic theoretical approach of the neo-impressionists” (The Impressionists in London, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 1973, p. 16).
Although his artistic endeavors in London were a great success, Pissarro’s best efforts to win over Jacob Bensusan were in vain. On 10 August, Lucien and Esther married without her family present for the ceremony. Pissarro returned home to Eragny a few days later and immediately invited Mirbeau and Monet to come see his views of Kew Gardens. The dealer Alphonse Portier expressed interest in purchasing the canvases in the fall but the artist demurred, hoping to sell them instead to Durand-Ruel, whose clientele was better heeled. His strategy paid off. Durand-Ruel was delighted with the new paintings, acquiring six of them in December 1892 and three more, including Jardin de Kew, Londres, près d’un étang, the following year.
In March 1893, Durand-Ruel featured the present painting in a solo exhibition of Pissarro’s work at his gallery in the rue Laffitte. The show received a glowing review from Gustave Geffroy in the periodical La Justice: “Camille Pissarro’s art is infinitely fine. There is a poet inseparable from the skilled painter, and the result is not a cold demonstration, but a luminous resumé of the appearances of things and of short-lived phenomena, magnificently set down once and for all” (quoted in J. Pissarro and C. Durnad-Ruel Snollaerts, op. cit., 2005, pp. 240-241). When Pissarro ran into his old friend Georges de Bellio soon after the show, the distinguished collector had nothing but praise for the artist’s achievement. “What’s staggering,” he wrote to Lucien, “is de Bellio saying to me that I’ve gone further than Monet, that my art is more serious and that I’ve surpassed Monet’s Poplars. Heavens! I hardly dare believe him!” (quoted in ibid., p. 241).
The next year, Pissarro—who had recently become a grandfather, when Esther gave birth to a daughter named Orovida Camille—was invited to take part in the first exhibition of La Libre Esthétique in Brussels, the successor to Les XX, which for ten years had been the principal vehicle for the dissemination of new artistic ideas in Belgium. The present view of Kew Gardens was one of two canvases that the artist opted to send to this important avant-garde showcase.
Pissarro had arrived in London in late May, for the third of four voyages that he would take to the English capital over the course of his career. The impetus for this trip was concern for Lucien, his eldest son and most frequent correspondent, who had settled in London two years earlier. Lucien had fallen in love with a young woman named Esther Bensusan and sought her family’s blessing for their marriage. Both young people were from traditional Jewish households. Her father Jacob, however, was adamantly opposed to the union, reproaching Lucien for his career choice—he too was an artist—and his lack of religious piety. Having encountered staunch resistance from his own parents when he decided to marry Julie Vellay, Pissarro was eager to spare his son such a conflict.
Unlike many of his Impressionist colleagues, who shunned traditional marital life, Pissarro was a quintessential family man and doted on his children—eight in all, six of whom survived to adulthood. He taught them to draw and paint (with the exception of his daughter Jeanne, whom Julie insisted should have a more traditional upbringing) and assiduously nurtured their intellectual development. “He became the kind of father he never had,” Richard Brettell has written, “less a restraining force on the lives of his children than an anxiously patient guide to life” (Pissarro’s People, exh. cat., Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, 2011, p. 117). When Lucien encountered difficulties in his personal life, Pissarro did not hesitate to enter the fray. “There’s no other solution but to ask her father for her hand,” he advised his son. “I’m willing to do what’s necessary to try to secure it for you” (quoted in J. Pissarro and C. Durnad-Ruel Snollaerts, op. cit., 2005, p. 236).
On his arrival in London, Pissarro settled into the flat at 7 Colville Square in Bayswater that Lucien shared with his brother Georges. By 10 June, he had begun to paint at Kew Gardens, some five miles southwest of Bayswater in suburban Richmond; late in the month, he moved to rented quarters above a bakery at the corner of Gloucester Road and Kew Green to be closer to his motifs. “I’m trying to do my best here despite the weather’s constant variations,” he reported to Mirbeau. “The Kew Gardens are wonderful and the surrounding country is superb. But time is so short and the work to be done so long that I despair!” (quoted in ibid., p. 616).
During the ensuing two months, Pissarro painted eight large views of the lush Gardens from different angles, as well as three canvases depicting the splendid vista from his balcony over the adjacent Green. In the present painting, a group of elegantly dressed men, women, and children—out for a leisurely excursion on a splendid summer day—stroll along a grassy path that leads up a low rise in the middle distance, presumably toward the pond of the title. Reflecting Pissarro’s experimentation with Divisionist techniques during the late 1880s, the dominant blue-green hues of the canvas are heightened with accents of complementary orange, and pigment is applied in myriad tiny touches to create a disciplined, close-knit tapestry of color. The composition, however, exudes all the freedom and spontaneity of plein-air painting, with trees of varying shapes and sizes creating an irregular, gently rolling band of foliage that echoes the subtle undulations in the land and the loose pattern of wispy clouds.
“These are delightful, relaxed works,” Alan Bowness has written, “in which Camille seems to have happily returned to the manner of painting natural to him, abandoning the dogmatic theoretical approach of the neo-impressionists” (The Impressionists in London, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 1973, p. 16).
Although his artistic endeavors in London were a great success, Pissarro’s best efforts to win over Jacob Bensusan were in vain. On 10 August, Lucien and Esther married without her family present for the ceremony. Pissarro returned home to Eragny a few days later and immediately invited Mirbeau and Monet to come see his views of Kew Gardens. The dealer Alphonse Portier expressed interest in purchasing the canvases in the fall but the artist demurred, hoping to sell them instead to Durand-Ruel, whose clientele was better heeled. His strategy paid off. Durand-Ruel was delighted with the new paintings, acquiring six of them in December 1892 and three more, including Jardin de Kew, Londres, près d’un étang, the following year.
In March 1893, Durand-Ruel featured the present painting in a solo exhibition of Pissarro’s work at his gallery in the rue Laffitte. The show received a glowing review from Gustave Geffroy in the periodical La Justice: “Camille Pissarro’s art is infinitely fine. There is a poet inseparable from the skilled painter, and the result is not a cold demonstration, but a luminous resumé of the appearances of things and of short-lived phenomena, magnificently set down once and for all” (quoted in J. Pissarro and C. Durnad-Ruel Snollaerts, op. cit., 2005, pp. 240-241). When Pissarro ran into his old friend Georges de Bellio soon after the show, the distinguished collector had nothing but praise for the artist’s achievement. “What’s staggering,” he wrote to Lucien, “is de Bellio saying to me that I’ve gone further than Monet, that my art is more serious and that I’ve surpassed Monet’s Poplars. Heavens! I hardly dare believe him!” (quoted in ibid., p. 241).
The next year, Pissarro—who had recently become a grandfather, when Esther gave birth to a daughter named Orovida Camille—was invited to take part in the first exhibition of La Libre Esthétique in Brussels, the successor to Les XX, which for ten years had been the principal vehicle for the dissemination of new artistic ideas in Belgium. The present view of Kew Gardens was one of two canvases that the artist opted to send to this important avant-garde showcase.
Nota do blog: Vendida em 2017 em leilão da Christie's por US$ 4,692,500.
Jovem Penteando o Cabelo (Jeune Fille se Peignant, La Toilette) - Pierre Auguste Renoir
Jovem Penteando o Cabelo (Jeune Fille se Peignant, La Toilette) - Pierre Auguste Renoir
Coleção privada
OST - 55x46 - 1894
“I have taken up again, never to abandon it, my old style, soft
and light of touch,” Renoir wrote to his dealer Durand-Ruel in 1888, full of
enthusiasm for his latest efforts. “This is to give you some idea of my new and
final manner of painting—like Fragonard, but not so good” (quoted in J. House, Renoir
in the Barnes Foundation, New Haven, 2012, p. 121).
This approach—which represented a sea-change after the controversial, Ingres-inspired method that Renoir had cultivated in the previous decade—plainly informs the present painting, a softly brushed boudoir scene depicting a young woman who gently combs her waist-length, golden tresses. The model is clad in a simple white chemise with a slight sheen, which slips from her shoulders to reveal an expanse of creamy skin that catches the light as it enters from the left. A portion of her pink skirt is also visible as well, the rosy hue echoing the delicate bloom on her cheeks and lips. Although the model’s identity is unknown, her youthful, rounded features conform closely to Renoir’s preferred type during the 1890s, softer and more idealized than the naturalistic young grisettes or working girls whom he had portrayed during his Impressionist heyday. “For me, a painting should be something pleasant, joyous, and pretty,” he now insisted, “yes, pretty!” (ibid., p. 16).
The theme of the woman styling her hair, and more broadly that of Jeune fille se peignant (La Toilette), has an illustrious artistic lineage dating back to Renaissance vanitas portraits, in which the woman in front of a mirror, gazing at her own image, joins the viewer in treating herself as an object of visual pleasure. In Renoir’s day, various avant-garde painters pressed into service this time-honored motif to critique the artifice of modern life. Manet’s Nana, for instance, depicts a contemporary Parisian courtesan who ostentatiously adorns herself under the scrutiny of a top-hatted client; Seurat, in Jeune femme se poudrant, presents a tightly corseted woman seated before an array of cosmetics from which she constructs her public image. Renoir, in contrast, portrays such preparations as pleasurable rather than obligatory, liberating rather than constraining. The model’s cheeks are naturally flushed, her hair tumbles freely over one shoulder, and her expression is one of gentle reverie.
“The ostensible theme,” John House has written, “is self-adornment and women’s preoccupation with appearances; but the vision that is being realized is of course Renoir’s own: while the model prepares herself for display, she displays herself to the painter, who posed her thus, and to the viewer of the picture” (Renoir, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 1985, p. 282).
The private ritual of hair-combing would also have carried a strongly sensual, even fetishistic charge for nineteenth-century viewers, as Renoir was well aware. The motif features in Ingres’s Orientalist harem fantasy, Le bain turc (1862), and in the naturalistic brothel imagery of Toulouse-Lautrec; Japanese woodblock prints show women in the pleasure-houses of old Edo tending their manes, and the Goncourts’ novel La fille Elisa (1877) includes a scene of two prostitutes brushing each other’s hair. When Renoir’s colleague Degas turned to the theme in the 1880s, he subverted these provocative connotations, presenting the act of hair-combing as one of the most banal and wearisome of daily routines, associated with personal hygiene as much as glamour. Renoir, for his part, staked out a middle ground, delighting in the extravagantly long and undone hair of his models—an emblem of their femininity—but eschewing overt eroticism in favor of a hushed and dreamy intimacy.
In the present scene, the young woman gazes out of image to the left, seemingly unaware of the artist’s scrutinizing presence. Her luxuriant mane, glinting in the light, occupies nearly the full height of the canvas, recalling the poet Mallarmé’s paean to female beauty: “A kind of madness, original and naïve, a golden ecstasy, I don’t know how to describe it! Which she calls her hair” (“Le phénomène futur,” 1891; quoted in A. Distel, Renoir, New York, 2010, p. 276). The model’s profile, pale and luminous, stands out against the darker ground, which suggests a subtly variegated velvet curtain cloistering the boudoir space. The harmonious, integrated palette of warm tones—cream, pink, taupe, olive, and gold—as well as the uniformly soft touch of Renoir’s caressing brush heighten the effect of a private, self-contained world.
The “new and final manner” that Renoir described to Durand-Ruel was an immediate success, ushering in a decade of mounting prosperity and long-awaited fame for the artist. In 1890, just shy of his fiftieth birthday and secure at last that he could support a family, Renoir married Aline Charigot, his long-time companion and the mother of his young son Pierre. “I’m in demand again on the market,” he wrote to the collector Paul Berard. “If nothing happens to disturb my work, it will go like clockwork” (quoted in B.E. White, Renoir: His Life, Art, and Letters, New York, 1984, p. 189). In 1892, the French State purchased Renoir’s Jeunes filles au piano for the Musée Luxembourg, a mark of official recognition that the artist himself counted as one of his crowning achievements.
The younger generation of critics and artists also embraced Renoir’s recent work. His idealized young girls, with their air of timelessness, appealed to Symbolist proclivities, suggesting an essential meaning beneath external appearances. “An idealist? No. A naturalist? If that’s what we want to call him,” wrote the Nabi painter Maurice Denis, the most vocal theoretician of his cohort. “Renoir has limited himself to translating his personal emotions, the entirety of nature and the entirety of dream, with methods personal to him. He has composed with the pleasures of his eyes wonderful bouquets of women and flowers. And since he is large of heart and strong of will, he has created only beautiful things” (“Notes d’art et d’esthétique,” La Revue Blanche, June 1892; quoted in A. Distel, op. cit., 2010, p. 289).
This approach—which represented a sea-change after the controversial, Ingres-inspired method that Renoir had cultivated in the previous decade—plainly informs the present painting, a softly brushed boudoir scene depicting a young woman who gently combs her waist-length, golden tresses. The model is clad in a simple white chemise with a slight sheen, which slips from her shoulders to reveal an expanse of creamy skin that catches the light as it enters from the left. A portion of her pink skirt is also visible as well, the rosy hue echoing the delicate bloom on her cheeks and lips. Although the model’s identity is unknown, her youthful, rounded features conform closely to Renoir’s preferred type during the 1890s, softer and more idealized than the naturalistic young grisettes or working girls whom he had portrayed during his Impressionist heyday. “For me, a painting should be something pleasant, joyous, and pretty,” he now insisted, “yes, pretty!” (ibid., p. 16).
The theme of the woman styling her hair, and more broadly that of Jeune fille se peignant (La Toilette), has an illustrious artistic lineage dating back to Renaissance vanitas portraits, in which the woman in front of a mirror, gazing at her own image, joins the viewer in treating herself as an object of visual pleasure. In Renoir’s day, various avant-garde painters pressed into service this time-honored motif to critique the artifice of modern life. Manet’s Nana, for instance, depicts a contemporary Parisian courtesan who ostentatiously adorns herself under the scrutiny of a top-hatted client; Seurat, in Jeune femme se poudrant, presents a tightly corseted woman seated before an array of cosmetics from which she constructs her public image. Renoir, in contrast, portrays such preparations as pleasurable rather than obligatory, liberating rather than constraining. The model’s cheeks are naturally flushed, her hair tumbles freely over one shoulder, and her expression is one of gentle reverie.
“The ostensible theme,” John House has written, “is self-adornment and women’s preoccupation with appearances; but the vision that is being realized is of course Renoir’s own: while the model prepares herself for display, she displays herself to the painter, who posed her thus, and to the viewer of the picture” (Renoir, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 1985, p. 282).
The private ritual of hair-combing would also have carried a strongly sensual, even fetishistic charge for nineteenth-century viewers, as Renoir was well aware. The motif features in Ingres’s Orientalist harem fantasy, Le bain turc (1862), and in the naturalistic brothel imagery of Toulouse-Lautrec; Japanese woodblock prints show women in the pleasure-houses of old Edo tending their manes, and the Goncourts’ novel La fille Elisa (1877) includes a scene of two prostitutes brushing each other’s hair. When Renoir’s colleague Degas turned to the theme in the 1880s, he subverted these provocative connotations, presenting the act of hair-combing as one of the most banal and wearisome of daily routines, associated with personal hygiene as much as glamour. Renoir, for his part, staked out a middle ground, delighting in the extravagantly long and undone hair of his models—an emblem of their femininity—but eschewing overt eroticism in favor of a hushed and dreamy intimacy.
In the present scene, the young woman gazes out of image to the left, seemingly unaware of the artist’s scrutinizing presence. Her luxuriant mane, glinting in the light, occupies nearly the full height of the canvas, recalling the poet Mallarmé’s paean to female beauty: “A kind of madness, original and naïve, a golden ecstasy, I don’t know how to describe it! Which she calls her hair” (“Le phénomène futur,” 1891; quoted in A. Distel, Renoir, New York, 2010, p. 276). The model’s profile, pale and luminous, stands out against the darker ground, which suggests a subtly variegated velvet curtain cloistering the boudoir space. The harmonious, integrated palette of warm tones—cream, pink, taupe, olive, and gold—as well as the uniformly soft touch of Renoir’s caressing brush heighten the effect of a private, self-contained world.
The “new and final manner” that Renoir described to Durand-Ruel was an immediate success, ushering in a decade of mounting prosperity and long-awaited fame for the artist. In 1890, just shy of his fiftieth birthday and secure at last that he could support a family, Renoir married Aline Charigot, his long-time companion and the mother of his young son Pierre. “I’m in demand again on the market,” he wrote to the collector Paul Berard. “If nothing happens to disturb my work, it will go like clockwork” (quoted in B.E. White, Renoir: His Life, Art, and Letters, New York, 1984, p. 189). In 1892, the French State purchased Renoir’s Jeunes filles au piano for the Musée Luxembourg, a mark of official recognition that the artist himself counted as one of his crowning achievements.
The younger generation of critics and artists also embraced Renoir’s recent work. His idealized young girls, with their air of timelessness, appealed to Symbolist proclivities, suggesting an essential meaning beneath external appearances. “An idealist? No. A naturalist? If that’s what we want to call him,” wrote the Nabi painter Maurice Denis, the most vocal theoretician of his cohort. “Renoir has limited himself to translating his personal emotions, the entirety of nature and the entirety of dream, with methods personal to him. He has composed with the pleasures of his eyes wonderful bouquets of women and flowers. And since he is large of heart and strong of will, he has created only beautiful things” (“Notes d’art et d’esthétique,” La Revue Blanche, June 1892; quoted in A. Distel, op. cit., 2010, p. 289).
Busto de Mulher, De Perfil (Buste de Femme, de Profil) - Pierre Auguste Renoir
Busto de Mulher, De Perfil (Buste de Femme, de Profil) - Pierre Auguste Renoir
Coleção privada
OST - 65x54 - 1884
Buste de jeune fille (Femme de profil) depicts an attractive, dark-haired ingénue, poised on the very brink of womanhood. Her hair is gathered up in a chignon, with just a few tendrils escaping down the creamy nape of her neck, and her dress slips slightly from one shoulder, lending the canvas a subtle erotic frisson that enlivens the reserved, decorous pose. Rejecting the Impressionist technique of fusing the figure with her surroundings, Renoir has distinctly demarcated the young woman’s solidly modeled form against a broadly brushed, cobalt blue background. She is illuminated from above with a uniform, white light, which accentuates the contrast between her pale, milky skin and the rich, dark ground. Her simple, pyramidal shape lends the composition a monumental, timeless air, which is underscored by her distant gaze.
“In technique, composition, and subject matter,” John House has explained, “Renoir was deliberately moving away from any suggestion of the fleeting or the contingent, away from the Impressionist preoccupation with the captured instant, towards a more timeless vision of woman” (Renoir, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 1985, p. 242).
Renoir painted this appealing canvas in 1884, while deeply engaged in a process of experimentation and resolution, during which he wholly re-ordered his goals as a painter. He had first started to explore alternatives to Impressionism as early as 1879, a time of disillusionment in the Impressionist group as a whole. The strategy of independently organized, cooperative exhibitions had brought little real success, and even such dedicated supporters as Zola were encouraging the Impressionists to go beyond the informal, freely brushed sketch and to produce more resolved pictorial statements. Seeking inspiration in the art of the past, Renoir began to study the work of Ingres and immersed himself in Cennino Cennini’s Il Libro dell’Arte, a fifteenth-century Florentine manual of painting technique. In the winter of 1881-1882, he undertook a three-month voyage to Italy, where he admired “the grandeur and simplicity of the ancient painters” and became ever more convinced that he was on the right course (quoted in ibid., p. 220).
Within a year of his return, Renoir found himself in the grips of an aesthetic crisis. “A sort of break came in my work about 1883,” he told Ambroise Vollard late in his life. “I had wrung Impressionism dry, and I finally came to the conclusion that I knew neither how to paint nor draw” (quoted in Renoir in the Barnes Foundation, New Haven, 2012, p. 113). For the next three years, he traveled very little, exhibited only occasionally, and accepted few portrait commissions, focusing instead on consolidating his new, classicizing conception of the figure. “Everything betrays accomplished research and the brilliant effort to create something new,” wrote Octave Mirbeau when the culminating work of this period, Les grandes baigneuses (Dauberville, no. 1292; Philadelphia Museum of Art), was exhibited at the Galerie Georges Petit in spring 1887 (quoted in A. Distel, Renoir, New York, 2010, p. 249).
Eschewing the seeming spontaneity and imprecision of Impressionism, the present Buste de jeune fille heralds this new direction in Renoir’s art. The identity of the nubile young woman who posed for the canvas remains unknown. Whereas society portraiture required a certain physiognomic specificity, paintings such as Buste de jeune fille—generalized celebrations of l’éternel feminin, rather than genuine likenesses of a particular sitter—imposed no such constraints. Renoir never hesitated, therefore, to alter his models’ appearance to conform to an ideal type, with rounded features, pearly pink skin, a snub nose, bee-stung lips, and wide eyes.
“How difficult it is in a picture to find the exact point at which to stop copying nature,” he explained to the painter Albert André. “The painting must not smell too strongly of the model, but at the same time, you must get the feeling of nature. A painting is not a verbatim record. The most important thing is for it to remain painting” (quoted in Renoir in the 20th Century, exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2009, p. 67).
Nevertheless, it is tempting to speculate about which of Renoir’s attractive young models may have provided the initial inspiration for the present painting. With her dark, straight brows and side-swept, chestnut-colored bangs, the figure bears no small resemblance to Suzanne Valadon, who sat for Renoir repeatedly between 1883 and 1887. Valadon served as the model for both La danse à la ville and La danse à Bougival of 1882-1883 (Dauberville, nos. 1000-1001; Musée d’Orsay, Paris and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), Renoir’s last major statements on the theme of urban and suburban recreation, and for one of the two principal bathers in Les grandes baigneuses. “In Suzanne Valadon Renoir encountered a model of quite exceptional beauty, whose endless eyebrows, flawless skin, and demure smile had already recommended her to a host of painters,” Colin Bailey has written (Renoir’s Portraits: Impressions of an Age, exh. cat., National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 1997, p. 200).
Still more striking, however, is the resemblance between the young woman in Buste de jeune fille and two sisters, both up-and-coming actresses, who posed for Renoir in 1881-1882. The elder girl, Eugénie-Marie Darlaud, appears in Les deux soeurs, one of Renoir’s most celebrated emblems of modern life (Dauberville, no. 254; Art Institute of Chicago). Mademoiselle Darlaud would go on to become a star of the Théâtre Gymnase and the Comédie Française, whose prominent and well-heeled lovers included the composer Louis Varney and the chocolate mogul Gaston Menier. Renoir showed Les deux soeurs to great acclaim at the Seventh Impressionist Exhibition in 1882 and the same year painted Eugénie Darlaud’s younger sister Anne, better known by her stage name Jeanne Demarsy, who had recently posed for Manet’s exquisite allegory Le Printemps (no. 1060; Christie’s New York, 11 May 1995, lot 112). Could the Darlaud sisters have proven such appealing models that Renoir sought one of them out again in 1884, capturing her idealized likeness—timeless and refined, with just a hint of sensuality—in Buste de jeune fille?
Whoever the model, the painting found immediate success on the market, despite the economic crisis that gripped France at the time. Before the year’s end, it had entered the collection of Charles Haviland, a wealthy porcelain manufacturer from Renoir’s hometown of Limoges. Renoir, whose own first career had been as a decorator of porcelain plates and vases, probably met Haviland around 1872, when the latter founded a ceramics atelier on the outskirts of Paris. The two men grew closer in the late 1870s, when Haviland married the daughter of Renoir’s friend Philippe Burty, the art critic and fervent japoniste, and began to purchase Japanese prints and Impressionist pictures under Burty’s guidance; it was likely Burty who arranged for Renoir to paint a portrait of Haviland’s four-year-old son Paul in 1884 (Dauberville, no. 1261; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City).
Buste de jeune fille remained in Haviland’s possession for more than three decades. Henry Bernstein, the popular author of melodramas for the Paris stage and an outspoken critic of anti-Semitism, subsequently acquired the painting for his collection.
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