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Lot Essay
This painting will be included in the forthcoming Renoir catalogue raisonné from Franois Daulte being prepared by the Wildenstein Institute.
By the 1890s Renoir was enjoying renewed interest in his work and the prices paid for his paintings began to soar. His dealers Durand-Ruel assiduously cultivated his position as a fashionable society portraitist and painter of costume pieces. Concurrently, Renoir began to develop a more intimate style of portraiture in which he used his family and close friends as models in smaller-scale, informal portrait studies. While the indentity of the sitter in the present painting is unknown, she appears to belong to this second category in his work.
Painted in 1905 Buste de femme à la blouse rose emanates a luminosity typical of the works of this period. According to Colin Bailey it is what Mallarmè had called "'the natural light of day penetrating and influencing all things' which transforms and radicalizes Renoir's figures ...The use of natural light, rather than concern with milieu and context, is at the heart of Renoir's practice as a figure painter" (Renoir's Portraits: impressions of an Age, exh. cat., New Haven, 1997, pp. 21 and 25). The luminous quality of the painting is emphasized by the manner in which the light glistens in her eyes and on her hair and blouse. Renoir strove to create a natural, relaxed effect in his portraits. He asked his sitters to present themselves in their normal manner, dressed in the clothes they wore regularly so that the finished result would be true to modern life. In Buste de femme à la blouse rose Renoir posed his model against a neutral background. Her pose is unaffected and her golden hair is pulled loosely back from her face with a ribbon. She is dressed simply and wears no jewelry. Instead the viewer is presented with an image that captivates the innate beauty of the subject. As Theodore Druet wrote, "Not only does he catch the external features but through them he pinpoints the model's character and inner self" (as reprinted in Histoire des peintres impressionistes, Paris, 1922, pp. 27-28). Renoir achieves life-like realism in the painting not only through the physical arrangement of his subject but also with his painterly technique built on delicate brushstrokes and soft modulation of palette.
By the 1890s Renoir was enjoying renewed interest in his work and the prices paid for his paintings began to soar. His dealers Durand-Ruel assiduously cultivated his position as a fashionable society portraitist and painter of costume pieces. Concurrently, Renoir began to develop a more intimate style of portraiture in which he used his family and close friends as models in smaller-scale, informal portrait studies. While the indentity of the sitter in the present painting is unknown, she appears to belong to this second category in his work.
Painted in 1905 Buste de femme à la blouse rose emanates a luminosity typical of the works of this period. According to Colin Bailey it is what Mallarmè had called "'the natural light of day penetrating and influencing all things' which transforms and radicalizes Renoir's figures ...The use of natural light, rather than concern with milieu and context, is at the heart of Renoir's practice as a figure painter" (Renoir's Portraits: impressions of an Age, exh. cat., New Haven, 1997, pp. 21 and 25). The luminous quality of the painting is emphasized by the manner in which the light glistens in her eyes and on her hair and blouse. Renoir strove to create a natural, relaxed effect in his portraits. He asked his sitters to present themselves in their normal manner, dressed in the clothes they wore regularly so that the finished result would be true to modern life. In Buste de femme à la blouse rose Renoir posed his model against a neutral background. Her pose is unaffected and her golden hair is pulled loosely back from her face with a ribbon. She is dressed simply and wears no jewelry. Instead the viewer is presented with an image that captivates the innate beauty of the subject. As Theodore Druet wrote, "Not only does he catch the external features but through them he pinpoints the model's character and inner self" (as reprinted in Histoire des peintres impressionistes, Paris, 1922, pp. 27-28). Renoir achieves life-like realism in the painting not only through the physical arrangement of his subject but also with his painterly technique built on delicate brushstrokes and soft modulation of palette.