Lot Essay
Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Impressionist paintings are characterized by warm, luminous color and lively brushwork—as well as the artist's evident pleasure in feminine beauty. As the artist's son, Jean Renoir, wrote in his memoir, “Along with the roses, which grew almost wild in Les Collettes [the artist’s home in the south of France],” a young female model “was one of the vital elements which helped Renoir to interpret on his canvas the tremendous cry of love he uttered at the end of his life” (Renoir, My Father, New York, 2001, p. 426). The art historian Colin Bailey summarized the penultimate years of the artist’s career this way: “Renoir is the painter of ‘jeunes filles en fleurs’”—that is, young girls in bloom (“Late Renoir” in The Burlington Magazine, vol. 152, no. 1287, 2010, p. 410). Painted in 1914, Femme au corsage rose is a mature expression of this central theme in Renoir’s oeuvre.
Renoir’s subject in this canvas wears an elegant, peach-colored dress, accented by a delicate white collar. Most notably, the young model sports a fashionable hat adorned with a plush, crimson bow. Like several of his fellow Impressionists, Renoir was deeply interested in fashion. He often incorporated elements of modern design—new fabrics, patterns and accessories—into his paintings. These dresses, gloves, shoes, bags, fans and hats all conveyed specific information about the subject wearing them, and enabled the artist to incorporate new colors, textures and shapes into a composition. Hats, in particular, became one of the artist’s favorite motifs, and he encouraged his subjects to wear them. As Renoir wrote to an unidentified model in 1880, “Come to Chatou tomorrow with a pretty summer hat. Do you still have that big hat that you look so nice in? If so, I'd like that, the gray one, the one you wore in Argenteuil” (quoted in Renoir, exh. cat., Kunsthalle Tübingen, 1996, p. 204). Renoir undoubtedly viewed hats as vehicles for formal expression and innovation. The Post-Impressionists that succeeded him, including Vincent van Gogh and Henri Matisse, would similarly incorporate hats into their female portraits.
Renoir’s access to modern womenswear was undoubtedly facilitated by his relationship with Aline Charigot, who he met in late 1879 and married in 1890, after the birth of their first son, Pierre. Aline, who was twenty years younger than Renoir, worked as a dressmaker in Paris; her proximity to the fashion industry certainly informed Renoir’s artistic production. Aline frequently modeled for Renoir and was almost always depicted wearing a hat. In Renoir’s iconic 1881 masterpiece, Le déjeuner des canotiers (Dauberville, no. 224; The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.), for example, Aline posed for the young woman holding a dog and wearing a straw hat adorned with a pink ribbon and bold red flowers.
The subject in Femme au corsage rose, like many of the other models who were featured in Renoir’s canvases, is not identified by name. Her specific facial features are ultimately subject to Renoir’s vision of ideal beauty. As Octave Mirbeau, the nineteenth-century art critic and champion of Renoir’s art, wrote, “He is truly the painter of women, alternatively gracious and moving, knowing and simple, and always elegant, with an exquisite visual sensibility...he also gives a sense of the form of the soul, all woman's inward musicality and bewitching mystery” (quoted in N. Wadley, ed., Renoir, A Retrospective, New York, 1987, p. 165).
Renoir’s subject in this canvas wears an elegant, peach-colored dress, accented by a delicate white collar. Most notably, the young model sports a fashionable hat adorned with a plush, crimson bow. Like several of his fellow Impressionists, Renoir was deeply interested in fashion. He often incorporated elements of modern design—new fabrics, patterns and accessories—into his paintings. These dresses, gloves, shoes, bags, fans and hats all conveyed specific information about the subject wearing them, and enabled the artist to incorporate new colors, textures and shapes into a composition. Hats, in particular, became one of the artist’s favorite motifs, and he encouraged his subjects to wear them. As Renoir wrote to an unidentified model in 1880, “Come to Chatou tomorrow with a pretty summer hat. Do you still have that big hat that you look so nice in? If so, I'd like that, the gray one, the one you wore in Argenteuil” (quoted in Renoir, exh. cat., Kunsthalle Tübingen, 1996, p. 204). Renoir undoubtedly viewed hats as vehicles for formal expression and innovation. The Post-Impressionists that succeeded him, including Vincent van Gogh and Henri Matisse, would similarly incorporate hats into their female portraits.
Renoir’s access to modern womenswear was undoubtedly facilitated by his relationship with Aline Charigot, who he met in late 1879 and married in 1890, after the birth of their first son, Pierre. Aline, who was twenty years younger than Renoir, worked as a dressmaker in Paris; her proximity to the fashion industry certainly informed Renoir’s artistic production. Aline frequently modeled for Renoir and was almost always depicted wearing a hat. In Renoir’s iconic 1881 masterpiece, Le déjeuner des canotiers (Dauberville, no. 224; The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.), for example, Aline posed for the young woman holding a dog and wearing a straw hat adorned with a pink ribbon and bold red flowers.
The subject in Femme au corsage rose, like many of the other models who were featured in Renoir’s canvases, is not identified by name. Her specific facial features are ultimately subject to Renoir’s vision of ideal beauty. As Octave Mirbeau, the nineteenth-century art critic and champion of Renoir’s art, wrote, “He is truly the painter of women, alternatively gracious and moving, knowing and simple, and always elegant, with an exquisite visual sensibility...he also gives a sense of the form of the soul, all woman's inward musicality and bewitching mystery” (quoted in N. Wadley, ed., Renoir, A Retrospective, New York, 1987, p. 165).