A once-in-a-lifetime Impressionist masterpiece: Renoir’s luminous portrait of his favourite muse

For Pierre-Auguste Renoir, no subject was more fruitful to paint than the female form. ‘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,’ wrote curator and scholar Ann Dumas in the catalogue for the 2005 exhibition Renoir’s Women at the Columbus Museum of Art. From the fashionable urban bourgeois to the nude rural nymph, Renoir’s women remained forever young. ‘The simplest subjects are eternal,’ the artist 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.’

No woman is more emblematic of Renoir’s oeuvre than Nini Lopez, a young actress from Montmartre who was among the artist’s favourite models between 1874 and 1879 — the height of Renoir’s Impressionist period. Nini featured in more than 20 of his paintings and in various guises, including his iconic La Loge (1874), (The Courtauld Institute, London). This May Christie’s will offer Renoir’s La femme aux lilas (1876-1877), the largest known single-figure painting of Nini remaining in private hands and the artist’s finest painting to appear at auction since the record-breaking sale of Au Moulin de la Galette (1876), renamed Bal du Moulin de la Galette, 36 years ago.

Hailing from the esteemed collection of Lorinda Payson de Roulet, La femme aux lilas is a highlight of Christie’s 20th Century Evening Sale on 18 May in New York and the defining Impressionist painting of the season. ‘Renoir’s gift to art history was the Impressionist portrait, and La femme aux lilas is among its incontestable masterpieces,’ says Max Carter, Christie’s Chairman of 20th and 21st Century Art. ‘Acquired by Joan Whitney Payson and Charles Payson at the beginning of their legendary collecting journey in December 1929 for the staggering sum of $100,000, it has remained in the family ever since. Its peers are Renoir’s greatest figure paintings of the 1870s, the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist icons from the Whitney Payson collection and the finest Renoirs ever sold.’

Additional works from the collection by artists, including Marc Chagall, Edgar Degas, Winslow Homer, Alfred Sisley and Andrew Wyeth, will also be offered during Christie’s Spring Marquee Week Sales.

Below, discover more about Renoir’s beloved muse, as well as the exceptional provenance behind this legendary masterwork.

Lorinda Payson de Roulet continued her family’s remarkable legacy

Mrs. de Roulet comes from a legacy of exceptional art collectors and esteemed New Yorkers: she is a member of the Whitney Payson family and is a great-niece (by marriage) of the inimitable Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Her parents Joan Whitney Payson and Charles Shipman Payson were formidable and discerning collectors who obtained the Renoir in 1929 at the outset of their collecting journey. The painting boasts unmatched provenance, held in the same prestigious collection for 97 years. For more than a century, Lorinda Payson de Roulet’s family has shaped American culture through countless philanthropic contributions and ongoing patronage in the art world and beyond.

Over the course of four decades, Lorinda’s mother Joan Whitney Payson — a formidable businesswoman who co-founded the New York Mets in 1962, becoming the first woman to own and operate her own major American sports team — and her father, Charles Shipman Payson, assembled one of the finest collections of the 20th century, focused chiefly on the works of Renoir, Cezanne, van Gogh, Gauguin and Picasso, but also including exceptional Old Masters paintings by Rembrandt, Holbein and El Greco, and American painters from Homer to Wyeth. A selection of these she bequeathed to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a number of galleries there are named in her honour.

Prior to being acquired by Joan Whitney Payson and Charles Shipman Payson, La femme aux lilas was part of the celebrated collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces assembled by Alexandre Berthier, 4th Prince of Wagram, principally between 1905 and 1908. Aged 26, Joan Whitney Payson bought La femme aux lilas for $100,000 in December 1929, the year after she had acquired another of the artist’s works, La Confidence (1874), which was gifted to the Portland Museum of Art by her son, John Whitney Payson, in 1991.

The painting passed down to Mrs. de Roulet who inherited her mother’s tenacity, love of art and deep sense of duty. While continuing the family association with the Mets (she succeeded her mother as President), she stewarded her family’s art collection in service of philanthropy. Her civic commitments broadened as her public profile evolved. Drawn instinctively to institutions and activities that fostered community, from hospitals, schools and museums to baseball, Mrs. de Roulet served North Shore University Hospital in leadership roles and founded the Patrina Foundation, an organisation dedicated to providing women and girls with educational and social service resources.

Renoir’s history-making portraits and the young woman who helped cement his fame

Amongst the most recognised and celebrated icons of art history are Renoir’s portraits created in the mid-1870s. During this pivotal decade, he explored the female figure in a variety of settings, both in scenes of modern life, as well as, increasingly by the end of this period, portrait commissions from Paris’s wealthy upper classes. For his Impressionist models, Renoir turned to those who lived near him in Montmartre, picturing laundresses, seamstresses, milliners and artists’ models, those of a similar working class background to his own. Upon the canvas, he transformed these women into 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.

The intimate portrait La femme aux lilas shows how the artist reconceived portraiture to forge a modern form of this storied genre in the late nineteenth century. The subject Nini is pictured in a moment of peaceful introspection, clutching a voluminous bouquet of blossoming lilac, the delicacy and luminosity of which is echoed in the youthful beauty of the woman. The figure and her interior setting are conveyed with the same delicate, rapidly deployed brushstrokes, with Renoir creating a masterful synthesis of light and harmonious colour across the canvas’s surface.

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 (The Courtauld Institute, 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 the 1876 Bal du Moulin de la Galette. Nini began sitting for him frequently there, her appearance fitting perfectly with his conception of the feminine ideal.

In other portraits Nini appears leaving a concert in La sortie du Conservatoire of 1877 (The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia), immersed in the bustle of modern Paris in Au café (Kröller-Muller Museum, Otterlo) and, in contrast, as a disheveled, red-cheeked laundress in La Blanchisseuse (Laveuse) (The Art Institute of Chicago). She is the image of motherhood in Le premier pas (Private collection), while also posing for the erotically charged La Pensée (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.

With these distinctive paintings, Renoir blurred the boundaries 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; they could instead present a type, often serving as vehicles for stylistic experimentation. With this new sense of creativity unleashed, Renoir produced works that would forever change the course of art history.