Lot Essay
In 1894, Renoir hired sixteen-year-old Gabrielle Renard to help his wife Aline, who was then expecting their second child. Gabrielle would remain with the family for the next twenty years, until her marriage to the American painter Conrad Slade in 1912. Renoir's portrait of her, completed in 1908, reflects the artist's return to the traditions of Rubens and Titian, whose work reportedly gave him great joy. Although the warm palette and soft touch of the present work reveals Renoir's Impressionist roots, the solidity of the figure demonstrates the artist's mounting interest in a more classical form of art. Instead of painting soft young figures Renoir sought to depict robust, mature women like Gabrielle: "an artless, wild creature, blooming in perfumed scrub . . . a luxuriant, firm, healthy and naive woman with a powerful body, 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 viewers, these late portraits, including the present work, portray Renoir's quintessential ideal of the feminine form:
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 the 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).
Gabrielle reprisant was purchased directly from Renoir by the renowned collector Maurice Gangnat. Following an introduction from Paul Gallimard, the owner of the Thtre des Varits in Paris, Gangnat became one of Renoir's closest friends and most important patrons. Renoir himself acknowledged Gangnat's unerring taste, as Jean Renoir explains: "When he entered the studio, his glance always fell on the canvas which Renoir considered the best, 'He has an eye!' my father stated. Renoir also said that the collectors who really know anything about painting are rarer than painters (J. Renoir, op. cit., p. 397).
(fig. 1) Photograph of Gabrielle Renard.
Private Collection.
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 the 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).
Gabrielle reprisant was purchased directly from Renoir by the renowned collector Maurice Gangnat. Following an introduction from Paul Gallimard, the owner of the Thtre des Varits in Paris, Gangnat became one of Renoir's closest friends and most important patrons. Renoir himself acknowledged Gangnat's unerring taste, as Jean Renoir explains: "When he entered the studio, his glance always fell on the canvas which Renoir considered the best, 'He has an eye!' my father stated. Renoir also said that the collectors who really know anything about painting are rarer than painters (J. Renoir, op. cit., p. 397).
(fig. 1) Photograph of Gabrielle Renard.
Private Collection.