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.
