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Lot Essay
*This lot may be exempt from sales tax as set forth in the Sales Tax Notice in the back of the catalogue.
This work will be included in the forthcoming catalogue critique of Pierre-Auguste Renoir being prepared by the Wildenstein Institute established from the archives of François Daulte, Durand-Ruel, Venturi, Vollard and Wildenstein.
We are grateful to Guy-Patrice and Michel Dauberville for confirming that this painting is included in their Bernheim-Jeune archives as an authentic work.
Femme à la guitare belongs to a group of works that Renoir painted in the late 1890s of women and men playing the guitar. It is one of three related paintings of a russet-haired model named Germaine posing with a guitar in the artist's studio. Renoir's appreciation for "La Belle Otéro," a dancer at the Folies-Bergère who was celebrated at the time as the embodiment of Spanish seduction, is thought to have inspired these works. Although the model in the present work lacks the overtly Spanish costume seen in Jeune éspagnole avec une guitare, 1898 (National Gallery, Washington, D.C.), her abundantly ruffled green blouse and trimmed pink skirt still give the impression of a costume piece. This dramatic clothing contrasts the modest, informal modern dresses that the painter used in his numerous scenes from this period of young bourgeois women talking, reading, and sitting together. Renoir selected an equally elaborate white dress with large pink bows for the version that he sold to the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon in 1901 (fig. 1). Julie Manet, the daughter of Berthe Morisot and Eugène Manet, praised Renoir's guitar players after visiting his studio in 1897, writing: "He is working on some delightful guitar studies: a woman in a white chiffon dress which is held in position with pink bows leaning gracefully over a big yellow guitar, with her feet on a yellow cushion, another canvas is of a man in Spanish costume who seems to be playing lively tunes on his instrument. The whole effect is colorful, mellow, delicious" (quoted in R. Shone, exh. cat. A Very Private Collection: Janice H. Levin's Impressionist Pictures, New York, 2003, p. 87).
The theatrical context of the present work reflects Renoir's return to images of fashionable socializing in the late 1890s; paintings such as La Loge au Théâtre des Variétés, 1898 (private collection), display a similar interest in extravagant dress. During this period, Renoir often attended this popular venue as the guest of its owner, Paul Gallimard, who had befriended the painter upon purchasing some of his canvases in 1891. The portraits of actresses in costume and numerous images of stylishly dressed women in his home are testament to the painter's well-documented interest in women's fashion, especially millinery. John House has written, "His most often repeated subject was the fashionable modern costume piece--figures of girls, often wearing fancy hats, some head and shoulders, some half length, some full length, with single figures or pairs. It was with pictures such as these, it seems, that the found a real market in the 1890s, particularly with Durand-Ruel" (Renoir, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 1985, p. 251). Renoir admitted his weakness for "beautiful fabrics, shimmering silks, sparkling diamonds," but he stated, "The thought of adorning myself with them is horrifying! So I am grateful to others when they do so--provided I am permitted to paint them" (quoted in G. Adriani, Renoir, exh. cat., Kunsthalle Tübingen, 1996, p. 204).
Although inspired by popular entertainment, Renoir set Femme à la guitare in a private, domestic interior. This intimate background heightens the work's timeless quality and compliments the sitter's apparent imperviousness to the presence of her viewing audience. Richard Shone has written on the present work, "The exotic mood Renoir evokes here is found consistently throughout the work of his later years. While Manet, for example, began his career with a number of costume pieces and ended with scenes of contemporary urban life, Renoir largely reversed that direction, and from the 1890s or so, Parisian life disappears and models in 'oriental' and Spanish costumes populate a world of idealized figures in confined or abstracted settings. The present painting combines these two concepts, the original inspiration somehow removing the young woman from that world into one of solitary concentration" (R. Shone, op. cit., p. 89).
The theme of a figure playing a musical instrument also manifests Renoir's interest in the tradition of French painting, with precedents including Le Guitariste, 1755-1760 (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes) by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, and Le Chanteur espagnol, 1860 (Rouart and Wildenstein, no. 32; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) by Édouard Manet. Camille Corot's figure subjects were particularly influential for Renoir at this time, and the elder painter's numerous images of women with instruments, such as Gitane à la Mandoline of 1860-65 (fig. 2), share the sense of reverie in the present work. Charcoal drawings of Germaine indicate that Renoir sought a suitable pose for the guitarist by following the traditional practice of preparatory studies. Renoir also observed this introspective attitude in Berthe Morisot's La Mandoline, 1889 (fig. 3) in 1896 while helping Julie Manet, then seventeen years old, organize a retrospective of her mother's art at Durand-Ruel's gallery in Paris. On March 4th, Julie recorded in her diary, "M. Renoir is very fond of the painting La Mandoline, as well as the one next to it" (quoted in B.E. White, Renoir: His Life, Art, and Letters, New York, 1984, p. 202).
The ample form of Renoir's female guitar player also signals the artist's embrace of the monumental figurative tradition of Titian and Rubens in the last decades of his oeuvre. As John House has observed, Renoir's treatment of form in his group of women with guitars mirrors the mother from Rubens's Hélène Fourment and her children "which Renoir greatly admired" (op. cit., p. 265). "His interests in past art now focused less on the linearity of the Renaissance," states House, "but rather on Titian, Velázquez, Rubens, Rembrandt and Vermeer, and most particularly on the art of the French eighteenth century and on Corot. These artists, in their different ways, shared two qualities that were central to Renoir's concerns: they all modeled form and suggested space with the brush, rather than separating painting from drawing, color from line; and all found ways of transforming their close observation of the world around them into lasting pictorial form" (ibid., p. 250).
(fig. 1) Renoir, Femme jouant de la guitare, ca.1896-97. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon. BARCODE 20627607
(fig. 2) Camille Corot, Gitane à la Mandoline, 1874. Museum of Art, Sao Paolo. BARCODE 20627621
(fig. 3) Berthe Morisot, La Mandoline, 1889. Private collection. BARCODE 20627584
This work will be included in the forthcoming catalogue critique of Pierre-Auguste Renoir being prepared by the Wildenstein Institute established from the archives of François Daulte, Durand-Ruel, Venturi, Vollard and Wildenstein.
We are grateful to Guy-Patrice and Michel Dauberville for confirming that this painting is included in their Bernheim-Jeune archives as an authentic work.
Femme à la guitare belongs to a group of works that Renoir painted in the late 1890s of women and men playing the guitar. It is one of three related paintings of a russet-haired model named Germaine posing with a guitar in the artist's studio. Renoir's appreciation for "La Belle Otéro," a dancer at the Folies-Bergère who was celebrated at the time as the embodiment of Spanish seduction, is thought to have inspired these works. Although the model in the present work lacks the overtly Spanish costume seen in Jeune éspagnole avec une guitare, 1898 (National Gallery, Washington, D.C.), her abundantly ruffled green blouse and trimmed pink skirt still give the impression of a costume piece. This dramatic clothing contrasts the modest, informal modern dresses that the painter used in his numerous scenes from this period of young bourgeois women talking, reading, and sitting together. Renoir selected an equally elaborate white dress with large pink bows for the version that he sold to the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon in 1901 (fig. 1). Julie Manet, the daughter of Berthe Morisot and Eugène Manet, praised Renoir's guitar players after visiting his studio in 1897, writing: "He is working on some delightful guitar studies: a woman in a white chiffon dress which is held in position with pink bows leaning gracefully over a big yellow guitar, with her feet on a yellow cushion, another canvas is of a man in Spanish costume who seems to be playing lively tunes on his instrument. The whole effect is colorful, mellow, delicious" (quoted in R. Shone, exh. cat. A Very Private Collection: Janice H. Levin's Impressionist Pictures, New York, 2003, p. 87).
The theatrical context of the present work reflects Renoir's return to images of fashionable socializing in the late 1890s; paintings such as La Loge au Théâtre des Variétés, 1898 (private collection), display a similar interest in extravagant dress. During this period, Renoir often attended this popular venue as the guest of its owner, Paul Gallimard, who had befriended the painter upon purchasing some of his canvases in 1891. The portraits of actresses in costume and numerous images of stylishly dressed women in his home are testament to the painter's well-documented interest in women's fashion, especially millinery. John House has written, "His most often repeated subject was the fashionable modern costume piece--figures of girls, often wearing fancy hats, some head and shoulders, some half length, some full length, with single figures or pairs. It was with pictures such as these, it seems, that the found a real market in the 1890s, particularly with Durand-Ruel" (Renoir, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 1985, p. 251). Renoir admitted his weakness for "beautiful fabrics, shimmering silks, sparkling diamonds," but he stated, "The thought of adorning myself with them is horrifying! So I am grateful to others when they do so--provided I am permitted to paint them" (quoted in G. Adriani, Renoir, exh. cat., Kunsthalle Tübingen, 1996, p. 204).
Although inspired by popular entertainment, Renoir set Femme à la guitare in a private, domestic interior. This intimate background heightens the work's timeless quality and compliments the sitter's apparent imperviousness to the presence of her viewing audience. Richard Shone has written on the present work, "The exotic mood Renoir evokes here is found consistently throughout the work of his later years. While Manet, for example, began his career with a number of costume pieces and ended with scenes of contemporary urban life, Renoir largely reversed that direction, and from the 1890s or so, Parisian life disappears and models in 'oriental' and Spanish costumes populate a world of idealized figures in confined or abstracted settings. The present painting combines these two concepts, the original inspiration somehow removing the young woman from that world into one of solitary concentration" (R. Shone, op. cit., p. 89).
The theme of a figure playing a musical instrument also manifests Renoir's interest in the tradition of French painting, with precedents including Le Guitariste, 1755-1760 (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes) by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, and Le Chanteur espagnol, 1860 (Rouart and Wildenstein, no. 32; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) by Édouard Manet. Camille Corot's figure subjects were particularly influential for Renoir at this time, and the elder painter's numerous images of women with instruments, such as Gitane à la Mandoline of 1860-65 (fig. 2), share the sense of reverie in the present work. Charcoal drawings of Germaine indicate that Renoir sought a suitable pose for the guitarist by following the traditional practice of preparatory studies. Renoir also observed this introspective attitude in Berthe Morisot's La Mandoline, 1889 (fig. 3) in 1896 while helping Julie Manet, then seventeen years old, organize a retrospective of her mother's art at Durand-Ruel's gallery in Paris. On March 4th, Julie recorded in her diary, "M. Renoir is very fond of the painting La Mandoline, as well as the one next to it" (quoted in B.E. White, Renoir: His Life, Art, and Letters, New York, 1984, p. 202).
The ample form of Renoir's female guitar player also signals the artist's embrace of the monumental figurative tradition of Titian and Rubens in the last decades of his oeuvre. As John House has observed, Renoir's treatment of form in his group of women with guitars mirrors the mother from Rubens's Hélène Fourment and her children "which Renoir greatly admired" (op. cit., p. 265). "His interests in past art now focused less on the linearity of the Renaissance," states House, "but rather on Titian, Velázquez, Rubens, Rembrandt and Vermeer, and most particularly on the art of the French eighteenth century and on Corot. These artists, in their different ways, shared two qualities that were central to Renoir's concerns: they all modeled form and suggested space with the brush, rather than separating painting from drawing, color from line; and all found ways of transforming their close observation of the world around them into lasting pictorial form" (ibid., p. 250).
(fig. 1) Renoir, Femme jouant de la guitare, ca.1896-97. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon. BARCODE 20627607
(fig. 2) Camille Corot, Gitane à la Mandoline, 1874. Museum of Art, Sao Paolo. BARCODE 20627621
(fig. 3) Berthe Morisot, La Mandoline, 1889. Private collection. BARCODE 20627584