Lot Essay
The subject of the present portrait is Léontine, who came to work for the Renoir family at Les Collettes in Cagnes-sur-Mer shortly after the birth of the artist's youngest son Claude in 1901. Often compared with her predecessor Gabrielle (lot 41 in the present sale), Léontine's generously proportioned upper body and fresh, healthy face are typical of Renoir's best late portraits. Her hair, like Gabrielle's, is rich and black, and her apparent innocence is emphasized by her simple hair ribbon and by the stray tendrils that curl around her face.
After 1900, Renoir's adherence to the tenets of Impressionism largely gave way to a renewed focus upon the tradition of Rubens and Titian, whose work he reported to give him "quivers of joy." Although the warm palette and soft touch of Léontine lisant belies Renoir's Impressionist roots, the solidity of the figure reveals the artist's mounting interest in a more classicizing form of art.
Around 1905...Renoir was deliberately rejecting, it seems, some of
the most notorious aspects of Impressionism. Backgrounds were
painted in thinly over the white priming, but the principal areas
of the figure were normally treated more opaquely. His touch
remained fluent and supple, modelling forms with the loaded brush
without any return to the linearity of his experimental work of the 1880's. After 1905, his color schemes began to grow warmer and his touch more mobile. Soft varied nuances were threaded through his figures, and his backgrounds began to be treated, at times, with a
more emphatic touch, which draws them into an active relationship
with the main subject. This process of surface enrichment ushered
in the ebullience of his last works. (exh. cat., Renoir, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1985, p. 268)
Even Renoir's choice of models in his final twenty years indicates how strongly he had been influenced by classicism. Instead of painting fleshy young girls, he now selects robust, mature women like Léontine: "an artless, wild creature, blooming in perfumed scrub...a luxuriant, firm, healthy and naive woman with a powerful body, a small head, her eyes wide open, thoughtless, brilliant and ignorant, her lips blood-red and her nostrils dilated," as one critic commented just after the turn of the century. (C. Mauclair, The French Impressionists, London, 1903, p. 46) To many, these late portraits embody the quintessential "Renoir woman."
This face and this expression must have been so intensely conceived of and favored by Renoir that he found himself unable to disengage
from them; they are recognizable everywhere... Their eyes and lips are all touched with something strange and unconscious, as are all eyes which see existence anew, all smiling mouths eager to kiss and sing... In his portraits, even those which stray furthest from his ideal as observer, he goes straight to those favorite details, he
emphasizes those features, which he no doubt sees as being some of
the decisive proofs of femininity. All the great painters of women show this same instinctive selectiveness, this same creation of a
type of beauty, whether haughty, passionate, melancholy or charming, through which they have expressed their desire and rendered their
thought visible. (G. Geffroy, "La Vie Artistique: Auguste
Renoir," in N. Wadley, ed., Renoir: A Retrospective, New York, 1987, p. 190)
; E
After 1900, Renoir's adherence to the tenets of Impressionism largely gave way to a renewed focus upon the tradition of Rubens and Titian, whose work he reported to give him "quivers of joy." Although the warm palette and soft touch of Léontine lisant belies Renoir's Impressionist roots, the solidity of the figure reveals the artist's mounting interest in a more classicizing form of art.
Around 1905...Renoir was deliberately rejecting, it seems, some of
the most notorious aspects of Impressionism. Backgrounds were
painted in thinly over the white priming, but the principal areas
of the figure were normally treated more opaquely. His touch
remained fluent and supple, modelling forms with the loaded brush
without any return to the linearity of his experimental work of the 1880's. After 1905, his color schemes began to grow warmer and his touch more mobile. Soft varied nuances were threaded through his figures, and his backgrounds began to be treated, at times, with a
more emphatic touch, which draws them into an active relationship
with the main subject. This process of surface enrichment ushered
in the ebullience of his last works. (exh. cat., Renoir, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1985, p. 268)
Even Renoir's choice of models in his final twenty years indicates how strongly he had been influenced by classicism. Instead of painting fleshy young girls, he now selects robust, mature women like Léontine: "an artless, wild creature, blooming in perfumed scrub...a luxuriant, firm, healthy and naive woman with a powerful body, a small head, her eyes wide open, thoughtless, brilliant and ignorant, her lips blood-red and her nostrils dilated," as one critic commented just after the turn of the century. (C. Mauclair, The French Impressionists, London, 1903, p. 46) To many, these late portraits embody the quintessential "Renoir woman."
This face and this expression must have been so intensely conceived of and favored by Renoir that he found himself unable to disengage
from them; they are recognizable everywhere... Their eyes and lips are all touched with something strange and unconscious, as are all eyes which see existence anew, all smiling mouths eager to kiss and sing... In his portraits, even those which stray furthest from his ideal as observer, he goes straight to those favorite details, he
emphasizes those features, which he no doubt sees as being some of
the decisive proofs of femininity. All the great painters of women show this same instinctive selectiveness, this same creation of a
type of beauty, whether haughty, passionate, melancholy or charming, through which they have expressed their desire and rendered their
thought visible. (G. Geffroy, "La Vie Artistique: Auguste
Renoir," in N. Wadley, ed., Renoir: A Retrospective, New York, 1987, p. 190)
; E