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Lot Essay
Amasterwork of Impressionism, Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s La femme aux lilas (Portrait de Nini Lopez) encapsulates the quintessential style and subject matter that defined this revolutionary movement. Painted in 1876-1877, a high point in the life and work of Renoir, this intimate depiction of a young woman in an interior illustrates how the artist reconceived portraiture to forge a modern form of this storied genre in the late nineteenth century. Here, Nini Lopez, one of the artist’s favorite models of this time, is pictured in a moment of peaceful introspection, clutching a voluminous bouquet of blossoming lilacs, their delicacy and luminosity echoed in her youthful beauty. The figure and the interior setting are conveyed with the same delicate, rapidly deployed brushstrokes, as Renoir created a masterful synthesis of light and harmonious color across the surface of the canvas.
This extraordinary work also has an esteemed provenance: formerly in the legendary collection of Alexandre Berthier, 4th Prince de Wagram, it was later acquired in 1929 by the famed collectors, Joan Whitney and Charles Shipman Payson, and passed down to their daughter, the late Lorinda “Linda” Payson de Roulet, remaining in the family’s collection for almost a century.
Portraiture occupied Renoir throughout his career, but perhaps never more so than in the 1870s. During this pivotal decade, he explored the female figure in a variety of settings, both in genre scenes of modern life, and, increasingly by the end of this period, portrait commissions of Paris’s wealthy upper classes. In April 1878, Camille Pissarro described his fellow Impressionist as the “portraitiste éminent” of Paris, and in the L’Artiste annual review published the following year, Renoir was classified among the portraitistes rather than with his fellow Impressionist painters (quoted in C.B. Bailey, Renoir’s Portraits: Impressions of an Age, exh. cat., National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 1997, p. 4). As art historian and curator Colin B. Bailey has noted, it was with portraiture that Renoir chose to be represented both in the Salons to which he submitted his work between 1864 and 1883, as well as the majority of his submissions to the Impressionist exhibitions of 1876 and 1877 (ibid., p. ix).
Renoir painted La femme aux lilas at the height of the Impressionist moment, in the fervent period following the group’s first two independent exhibitions, held in 1874 and 1876, and around the time of the third iteration, held in 1877. Together with his friend and fellow artist, Claude Monet, Renoir had been a central force in the development of this revolutionary art movement. As early as 1869, working side-by-side at La Grenouillère, a suburb just outside Paris, the artists had achieved the unprecedented spontaneity of vision in front of nature, conveying the landscape with a novel form of lighter, more rapid handling, which would come to define the so-called New Painting.
Over the following years, these progressive artists, as well as Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Alfred Sisley, Pissarro, and others, coalesced together to mount their own exhibitions—the final leap to a wholly modern mode of painting, free of the entrenched Salon system. Renoir made two final efforts, both unsuccessful, to show his work at the official Salon before joining forces decisively with Monet. The “Société Anonyme Coopérative des Artistes” was officially constituted at Renoir’s apartment in Paris in December 1873, and the group finally held their inaugural exhibition the following spring.
Public response to this historic venture was mixed. A number of critics took great affront at the young painters’ audacious subversion of long-standing Salon norms—particularly the gestural handling and freshness of their touch. “What do we see in the work of these men?” Etienne Carjat asked in Le Patriote Français during the First Impressionist Exhibition. “Nothing but a defiance, almost an insult to the taste and intelligence of the public” (quoted in The New Painting: Impressionism 1874-1886, exh. cat., Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1986, pp. 108-109). More prescient observers, in contrast, had no doubt that Renoir and his allies were creating the most forward-thinking and consequential work of any artists in France. “The means by which they seek their impressions will infinitely serve contemporary art,” Armand Silvestre declared in L’Opinion Nationale (quoted in ibid., pp. 108-109).
Renoir’s figure paintings stood at the forefront of the movement. Unlike Monet, whose focus by this time was predominantly on the landscape, Renoir, like Manet and Degas, used this genre as a vehicle for his exploration of new techniques and new subjects. With works such as La femme aux lilas, Renoir has not posed or staged his figure, but rather captured her as if in a fleeting moment of introspection or pause. As the artist’s brother, Edmond Renoir once remarked, “When [Renoir] paints a portrait he asks his model to behave normally, to sit as she usually sits, to dress as she usually dresses, so that nothing smacks of constraint or artificial preparation” (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 1997, p. 20).
Renoir’s naturalistic approach was conveyed through his handling. As the present work so masterfully shows, Renoir has filled the scene with light, illuminating the young woman’s radiant visage, gold and auburn hair, and the soft red of her lips, all of which are complemented by the shimmering blues of her dress and the background in which she sits. This approach was entirely radical and transformative, as Renoir breathed life into this historic genre, depicting his figures with a vitality, beauty, and above all, a sense of modernity that exemplified the ideals of Impressionism.
When [Renoir] paints a portrait he asks his model to behave normally, to sit as she usually sits, to dress as she usually dresses, so that nothing smacks of constraint or artificial preparation.Edmond Renoir
For his Impressionist models, Renoir turned to those who lived near him in Montmartre, painting laundresses, seamstresses, milliners, and artists’ models, those of a similar working class background to his own. Upon the canvas, he transformed these women, often his friends or acquaintances, into modish Parisiennes, pictured in the latest fashions, at cafés, dance halls, on the city’s newly constructed boulevards and streets, as well as in quiet interior or garden settings.
For the present work, Renoir focused his gaze on his favored model of the time, Nini Lopez. Though few details exist of Nini’s life, Rivière described her as “an ideal model: punctual, serious, and discreet, she took up no more room than a cat in the studio... She had a marvelous head of shining, golden blond hair, long eyelashes beneath well-arched brows and a profile of classical purity” (quoted in N. Wadley, ed., Renoir: A Retrospective, New York, 1987, p. 87).
This fair-haired woman first appeared in Renoir’s art in 1874, posing with his brother in one of his most important works, La Loge (Dauberville, no. 262; The Courtauld Gallery, London). The following year, Renoir moved into a new studio on the rue Cortot in Montmartre, which was famously adjoined by a large garden that became the setting for his 1876 painting, Bal du Moulin de la Galette (Dauberville, no. 211; Musée d’Orsay, Paris). Nini began sitting for him frequently there, her appearance fitting perfectly with his conception of the feminine ideal.
Nini featured in various guises in just over twenty works from this time until 1879, at which point it is said that she married a mediocre Montmartre actor, against her mother’s wishes. La femme aux lilas is the largest known single figure portrait of Nini in private hands. In La sortie du Conservatoire of 1877 (Dauberville, no. 213; The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia) she is seen pictured leaving a concert, while she appears immersed in the bustle of modern Paris in Au Café (Dauberville, no. 235; Kröller-Muller Museum, Otterlo), and, in contrast, as a disheveled, red-cheeked laundress in La Blanchisseuse (Laveuse) (Dauberville, no. 382; The Art Institute of Chicago). She is the image of motherhood in Le premier pas (Dauberville, no. 250; Private collection), while also posing for the erotically charged La Pensée (Dauberville, no. 227; The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham), and in the studio garden in a series of sun-dappled works including The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Nini au jardin (Dauberville, no. 302).
Renoir is above all a painter of human beings… You feel that you are seeing Rubens illuminated by the fiery sun of Velázquez.Emile ZolaIn Portrait de Nini Lopez (Dauberville, no. 315; Musée d’art moderne André Malraux, Le Havre), painted in 1876, Renoir pictured Nini in the same distinct blue colored dress, complete with a white pinafore and an elaborate bow around the neck. In what appears to be the same setting as La femme aux lilas, Nini gazes pensively outwards, lost in thought. With these quiet, interior works, Renoir blurred the distinctions between portraiture and genre scenes, posing friends, family, and acquaintances in modern narratives and scenes of everyday life. No longer did portraits need to be “of” someone—instead, they could present a type, often serving purely as vehicles for bold stylistic experimentation. As Barbara E. White has written, these works are “intimate studies... Renoir treated his figures as models in active scenes; these are not meant to be revealing character studies. Consequently, he blurred the distinction between making a portrait of someone and using that person as a model” (Impressionists Side by Side, New York, 1996, p. 91).
For Renoir, the motif of the young woman, whether known or unknown, an individual portrait or a “type” remained the quintessential and defining subject of his art. “Renoir loved women,” the curator and art historian, Ann Dumas has written. “To the end of his life, it was by his painting of women that he wanted to be judged. They provided him with the most potent source of inspiration and are at the center of the idyllic, harmonious worlds he constructed throughout his long career” (Renoir’s Women, exh. cat., Columbus Museum of Art, 2005, p. 9). From the fashionable urban bourgeois to the nude rural nymph, Renoir’s women remained forever young. “The simplest subjects are eternal,” he once stated. “A nude woman getting out of the briny deep or out of her bed, whether she is called Venus or Nini, one can invent nothing better” (quoted in Renoir, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 1985, p. 263).
La femme aux lilas was initially part of the impressive collection of Alexandre Louis Philippe Marie Berthier, 4th Prince de Wagram, a title bestowed on his great-grandfather by Napoleon I. Berthier was the son of Bertha Clara von Rothschild, a figure mentioned in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu—the writer also described Berthier himself as “a young prince who liked Impressionist painting and motoring” (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 1985, p. 25). The year after his mother’s death in 1903, when he turned twenty-one, Berthier inherited an enormous fortune. He began collecting decorative arts as well as cars, before in 1905, embarking on a major collecting spree, buying works—several hundred in total it is thought—by the leading artists of the time, including Gustave Courbet, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cezanne, Paul Gauguin, Degas, Monet, Pissarro, and more.
Renoir’s La femme aux lilas was among the earliest of his known acquisitions, entering his collection in June 1905. Other important works he owned included Renoir’s Le déjeuner des canotiers, now in The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., Manet’s famed Le vieux musicien, now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and Van Gogh’s Cyprès, now in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
In the spring of 1908, Berthier left his family mansion the Hôtel Wagram on Paris’s Right Bank, and bought a sprawling apartment on the fashionable quai d’Orsay on the Left Bank, where he hung a number of his acquisitions, rotating the works given their considerable number.
Berthier’s cousin, Elisabeth de Gramont wrote in 1919, the year after his death, “At age twenty-five, Alexandre of Wagram possessed a remarkable collection of modern paintings, acquired through instinctive purchases and shrewd selection. Its total market value would today be between forty and fifty million francs. Its impressive inventory contained thirty works by Courbet, fifty by Renoir, forty-seven by Van Gogh, twenty-eight by Cezanne, forty by Monet, twenty-six by Sisley, twenty by Pissarro, ten by Puvis de Chavannes, eleven by Degas, and twelve by Manet” (“Alexandre Berthier, Prince de Wagram,” La revue mondiale, 1 April, 1919, pp. 61–62, quoted in L. Saint-Raymond and H. Viraben, “The Virtual Collection of Alexandre Berthier, Prince of Wagram” in Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, vol. 19, no. 2, Autumn 2020).
Berthier was tragically killed while serving in the First World War. Upon reading his will, it was found that he had bequeathed many of his works to the French nation, including seventeen of his Renoirs. Later, a number of Berthier’s Renoirs were acquired by Dr. Alfred C. Barnes, and today reside in The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia.
La femme aux lilas (Portrait de Nini Lopez) listed in the stock book of M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., New York. The work was acquired by Joan Whitney and Charles Shipman Payson in December 1929.
La femme aux lilas was subsequently acquired by one of the most important collecting families in America, Joan Whitney and Charles Shipman Payson. Mrs. Payson bought La femme aux lilas in December 1929, aged 26, the year after she had acquired another of the artist’s works, La Confidence of 1874 (Dauberville, no. 266; Portland Museum of Art). Together these Impressionist works rank among the earliest of Payson’s lifetime of acquisitions. Her brother acquired the second version of Renoir’s Bal du Moulin de la Galette (Dauberville, no. 212; Private collection) in the exact same month—coincidentally this had also once belonged to Berthier. La Confidence was gifted to the Portland Museum of Art by the Paysons' son, John Whitney Payson in 1991, while La femme aux lilas remained in the family’s collection for almost a century. It has been unseen in public for almost sixty years.
This extraordinary work also has an esteemed provenance: formerly in the legendary collection of Alexandre Berthier, 4th Prince de Wagram, it was later acquired in 1929 by the famed collectors, Joan Whitney and Charles Shipman Payson, and passed down to their daughter, the late Lorinda “Linda” Payson de Roulet, remaining in the family’s collection for almost a century.
Portraiture occupied Renoir throughout his career, but perhaps never more so than in the 1870s. During this pivotal decade, he explored the female figure in a variety of settings, both in genre scenes of modern life, and, increasingly by the end of this period, portrait commissions of Paris’s wealthy upper classes. In April 1878, Camille Pissarro described his fellow Impressionist as the “portraitiste éminent” of Paris, and in the L’Artiste annual review published the following year, Renoir was classified among the portraitistes rather than with his fellow Impressionist painters (quoted in C.B. Bailey, Renoir’s Portraits: Impressions of an Age, exh. cat., National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 1997, p. 4). As art historian and curator Colin B. Bailey has noted, it was with portraiture that Renoir chose to be represented both in the Salons to which he submitted his work between 1864 and 1883, as well as the majority of his submissions to the Impressionist exhibitions of 1876 and 1877 (ibid., p. ix).
Renoir painted La femme aux lilas at the height of the Impressionist moment, in the fervent period following the group’s first two independent exhibitions, held in 1874 and 1876, and around the time of the third iteration, held in 1877. Together with his friend and fellow artist, Claude Monet, Renoir had been a central force in the development of this revolutionary art movement. As early as 1869, working side-by-side at La Grenouillère, a suburb just outside Paris, the artists had achieved the unprecedented spontaneity of vision in front of nature, conveying the landscape with a novel form of lighter, more rapid handling, which would come to define the so-called New Painting.
Over the following years, these progressive artists, as well as Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Alfred Sisley, Pissarro, and others, coalesced together to mount their own exhibitions—the final leap to a wholly modern mode of painting, free of the entrenched Salon system. Renoir made two final efforts, both unsuccessful, to show his work at the official Salon before joining forces decisively with Monet. The “Société Anonyme Coopérative des Artistes” was officially constituted at Renoir’s apartment in Paris in December 1873, and the group finally held their inaugural exhibition the following spring.
Public response to this historic venture was mixed. A number of critics took great affront at the young painters’ audacious subversion of long-standing Salon norms—particularly the gestural handling and freshness of their touch. “What do we see in the work of these men?” Etienne Carjat asked in Le Patriote Français during the First Impressionist Exhibition. “Nothing but a defiance, almost an insult to the taste and intelligence of the public” (quoted in The New Painting: Impressionism 1874-1886, exh. cat., Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1986, pp. 108-109). More prescient observers, in contrast, had no doubt that Renoir and his allies were creating the most forward-thinking and consequential work of any artists in France. “The means by which they seek their impressions will infinitely serve contemporary art,” Armand Silvestre declared in L’Opinion Nationale (quoted in ibid., pp. 108-109).
Renoir’s figure paintings stood at the forefront of the movement. Unlike Monet, whose focus by this time was predominantly on the landscape, Renoir, like Manet and Degas, used this genre as a vehicle for his exploration of new techniques and new subjects. With works such as La femme aux lilas, Renoir has not posed or staged his figure, but rather captured her as if in a fleeting moment of introspection or pause. As the artist’s brother, Edmond Renoir once remarked, “When [Renoir] paints a portrait he asks his model to behave normally, to sit as she usually sits, to dress as she usually dresses, so that nothing smacks of constraint or artificial preparation” (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 1997, p. 20).
Renoir’s naturalistic approach was conveyed through his handling. As the present work so masterfully shows, Renoir has filled the scene with light, illuminating the young woman’s radiant visage, gold and auburn hair, and the soft red of her lips, all of which are complemented by the shimmering blues of her dress and the background in which she sits. This approach was entirely radical and transformative, as Renoir breathed life into this historic genre, depicting his figures with a vitality, beauty, and above all, a sense of modernity that exemplified the ideals of Impressionism.
When [Renoir] paints a portrait he asks his model to behave normally, to sit as she usually sits, to dress as she usually dresses, so that nothing smacks of constraint or artificial preparation.Edmond Renoir
For his Impressionist models, Renoir turned to those who lived near him in Montmartre, painting laundresses, seamstresses, milliners, and artists’ models, those of a similar working class background to his own. Upon the canvas, he transformed these women, often his friends or acquaintances, into modish Parisiennes, pictured in the latest fashions, at cafés, dance halls, on the city’s newly constructed boulevards and streets, as well as in quiet interior or garden settings.
For the present work, Renoir focused his gaze on his favored model of the time, Nini Lopez. Though few details exist of Nini’s life, Rivière described her as “an ideal model: punctual, serious, and discreet, she took up no more room than a cat in the studio... She had a marvelous head of shining, golden blond hair, long eyelashes beneath well-arched brows and a profile of classical purity” (quoted in N. Wadley, ed., Renoir: A Retrospective, New York, 1987, p. 87).
This fair-haired woman first appeared in Renoir’s art in 1874, posing with his brother in one of his most important works, La Loge (Dauberville, no. 262; The Courtauld Gallery, London). The following year, Renoir moved into a new studio on the rue Cortot in Montmartre, which was famously adjoined by a large garden that became the setting for his 1876 painting, Bal du Moulin de la Galette (Dauberville, no. 211; Musée d’Orsay, Paris). Nini began sitting for him frequently there, her appearance fitting perfectly with his conception of the feminine ideal.
Nini featured in various guises in just over twenty works from this time until 1879, at which point it is said that she married a mediocre Montmartre actor, against her mother’s wishes. La femme aux lilas is the largest known single figure portrait of Nini in private hands. In La sortie du Conservatoire of 1877 (Dauberville, no. 213; The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia) she is seen pictured leaving a concert, while she appears immersed in the bustle of modern Paris in Au Café (Dauberville, no. 235; Kröller-Muller Museum, Otterlo), and, in contrast, as a disheveled, red-cheeked laundress in La Blanchisseuse (Laveuse) (Dauberville, no. 382; The Art Institute of Chicago). She is the image of motherhood in Le premier pas (Dauberville, no. 250; Private collection), while also posing for the erotically charged La Pensée (Dauberville, no. 227; The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham), and in the studio garden in a series of sun-dappled works including The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Nini au jardin (Dauberville, no. 302).
Renoir is above all a painter of human beings… You feel that you are seeing Rubens illuminated by the fiery sun of Velázquez.Emile ZolaIn Portrait de Nini Lopez (Dauberville, no. 315; Musée d’art moderne André Malraux, Le Havre), painted in 1876, Renoir pictured Nini in the same distinct blue colored dress, complete with a white pinafore and an elaborate bow around the neck. In what appears to be the same setting as La femme aux lilas, Nini gazes pensively outwards, lost in thought. With these quiet, interior works, Renoir blurred the distinctions between portraiture and genre scenes, posing friends, family, and acquaintances in modern narratives and scenes of everyday life. No longer did portraits need to be “of” someone—instead, they could present a type, often serving purely as vehicles for bold stylistic experimentation. As Barbara E. White has written, these works are “intimate studies... Renoir treated his figures as models in active scenes; these are not meant to be revealing character studies. Consequently, he blurred the distinction between making a portrait of someone and using that person as a model” (Impressionists Side by Side, New York, 1996, p. 91).
For Renoir, the motif of the young woman, whether known or unknown, an individual portrait or a “type” remained the quintessential and defining subject of his art. “Renoir loved women,” the curator and art historian, Ann Dumas has written. “To the end of his life, it was by his painting of women that he wanted to be judged. They provided him with the most potent source of inspiration and are at the center of the idyllic, harmonious worlds he constructed throughout his long career” (Renoir’s Women, exh. cat., Columbus Museum of Art, 2005, p. 9). From the fashionable urban bourgeois to the nude rural nymph, Renoir’s women remained forever young. “The simplest subjects are eternal,” he once stated. “A nude woman getting out of the briny deep or out of her bed, whether she is called Venus or Nini, one can invent nothing better” (quoted in Renoir, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 1985, p. 263).
La femme aux lilas was initially part of the impressive collection of Alexandre Louis Philippe Marie Berthier, 4th Prince de Wagram, a title bestowed on his great-grandfather by Napoleon I. Berthier was the son of Bertha Clara von Rothschild, a figure mentioned in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu—the writer also described Berthier himself as “a young prince who liked Impressionist painting and motoring” (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 1985, p. 25). The year after his mother’s death in 1903, when he turned twenty-one, Berthier inherited an enormous fortune. He began collecting decorative arts as well as cars, before in 1905, embarking on a major collecting spree, buying works—several hundred in total it is thought—by the leading artists of the time, including Gustave Courbet, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cezanne, Paul Gauguin, Degas, Monet, Pissarro, and more.
Renoir’s La femme aux lilas was among the earliest of his known acquisitions, entering his collection in June 1905. Other important works he owned included Renoir’s Le déjeuner des canotiers, now in The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., Manet’s famed Le vieux musicien, now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and Van Gogh’s Cyprès, now in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
In the spring of 1908, Berthier left his family mansion the Hôtel Wagram on Paris’s Right Bank, and bought a sprawling apartment on the fashionable quai d’Orsay on the Left Bank, where he hung a number of his acquisitions, rotating the works given their considerable number.
Berthier’s cousin, Elisabeth de Gramont wrote in 1919, the year after his death, “At age twenty-five, Alexandre of Wagram possessed a remarkable collection of modern paintings, acquired through instinctive purchases and shrewd selection. Its total market value would today be between forty and fifty million francs. Its impressive inventory contained thirty works by Courbet, fifty by Renoir, forty-seven by Van Gogh, twenty-eight by Cezanne, forty by Monet, twenty-six by Sisley, twenty by Pissarro, ten by Puvis de Chavannes, eleven by Degas, and twelve by Manet” (“Alexandre Berthier, Prince de Wagram,” La revue mondiale, 1 April, 1919, pp. 61–62, quoted in L. Saint-Raymond and H. Viraben, “The Virtual Collection of Alexandre Berthier, Prince of Wagram” in Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, vol. 19, no. 2, Autumn 2020).
Berthier was tragically killed while serving in the First World War. Upon reading his will, it was found that he had bequeathed many of his works to the French nation, including seventeen of his Renoirs. Later, a number of Berthier’s Renoirs were acquired by Dr. Alfred C. Barnes, and today reside in The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia.
La femme aux lilas (Portrait de Nini Lopez) listed in the stock book of M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., New York. The work was acquired by Joan Whitney and Charles Shipman Payson in December 1929.
La femme aux lilas was subsequently acquired by one of the most important collecting families in America, Joan Whitney and Charles Shipman Payson. Mrs. Payson bought La femme aux lilas in December 1929, aged 26, the year after she had acquired another of the artist’s works, La Confidence of 1874 (Dauberville, no. 266; Portland Museum of Art). Together these Impressionist works rank among the earliest of Payson’s lifetime of acquisitions. Her brother acquired the second version of Renoir’s Bal du Moulin de la Galette (Dauberville, no. 212; Private collection) in the exact same month—coincidentally this had also once belonged to Berthier. La Confidence was gifted to the Portland Museum of Art by the Paysons' son, John Whitney Payson in 1991, while La femme aux lilas remained in the family’s collection for almost a century. It has been unseen in public for almost sixty years.