拍品專文
Renoir was among the greatest of Impressionist portraitists, and his superiority in this field was acknowledged in his own day. In 1878 Théodore Duret stated, "Renoir excels at portraiture," and other critics called him a "portraitiste éminent" (quoted in C. Bailey, exh. cat., Renoir's Portraits, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 1997, p. 4). Moreover, portraiture was at the center of his oeuvre, more fundamental to his artistic achievement even than the nude. The supreme importance of Renoir in this genre is currently documented in the magnificent exhibition, Renoir's Portraits, now at the National Gallery of Canada.
Painted in 1886, the present work is a ravishingly beautiful image of a young, nubile girl. Dressed all in white, she is seated on a low divan; she leans forward slightly, one hand holding a letter in her lap, the other hand steadying her pose. Behind her is a golden oriental screen, whose only discernable feature is an elegant crane or heron at the right edge of the painting. The plumage of the crane is white, like the girl's dress, and the artist surely meant to equate the gracefulness of the girl and that of the bird.
The painting exemplifies characteristic components of Renoir's style as a portrait painter. The composition is pyramidal and centralized, giving the image a classic and harmonic structure. Renoir preferred this composition for portraits; examples of it abound throughout his oeuvre, from early pictures such as Mademoiselle Romaine Lascaux, 1864 (Daulte, no. 12; Cleveland Museum of Art) to late works like Tilla Durieux, 1914 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York); one close comparison is his painting of Madame Clapisson (fig. 1).
Another characteristic feature of the present picture is its brilliance and luminosity. Renoir prepared the ground of the painting with a rich, thick layer of white; in addition, he mixed white into nearly all the pigments, and virtually eliminated black from the palette, using blue and lavender instead for the shadowing. The result is a high-valued image of extraordinary radiance.
The luminosity of Renoir's pictures formed a striking contrast with contemporary portraiture, which typically relied on darker, more sober, hues. (One need only compare Renoir with Manet or Bazille to see the difference.) Colin Bailey has commented:
What distinguishes them [Renoir's portraits] from those of Renoir's contemporaries is the extraordinary light with which they are imbued, "the natural light of day penetrating and influencing all things," which transforms and radicalizes Renoir's figures set in interiors, both in his portraiture and in his genre painting... [This] use of natural light...is at the heart of Renoir's practice as a figure painter, and it accounts for much of the bewilderment with which his early work was received. For Mallarmé's perceptive comment on La Loge--"this scene is fantastically illuminated by an incongruous daylight"--could be applied to nearly all of Renoir's portraits. (Ibid., pp. 21-25)
Certainly, this is true of the present painting. Although the portrait is set in an interior, the ambient glow surrounding the girl is so strong that one is tempted to think that she is outside. The portrait of Madame Clapisson has exactly the same effect. One factor contributing to the radiance in these works is Renoir's depiction of the background in terms of patches of color and light: the pigments are applied in areas of allied color, and the brushwork is open and active. The variegated background of La jeune fille au cygne is typical of Renoir's most attractive paintings from this era. Another example of this is found in the painting Filette au cerceau (fig. 2).
The distinctive radiance of Renoir's palette was due in part to his response to French Rococo painting. Renoir adored the eighteenth-century masters Watteau, Fragonard and Boucher. In a letter to Durand-Ruel in 1885, he wrote:
I've taken up again the old sweet and light way of painting... It's nothing new; it's a sequel to eighteenth-century paintings... This is to explain my new technique (Fragonard, but not so good)... Believe me, I'm not comparing myself to an eighteenth-century master. But I have to explain to you in what direction I'm working. (Quoted in B.E. White, Renoir, His Life, Art and Letters, New York, 1984, pp. 157-158)
Others independently made the same connection. In 1877 the critic Burty wrote:
To discover a similar sort of portrait painting, one would have to go back to the spirited sketches of Fragonard...for a temper that is so quintessentially French. (Quoted in C. Bailey, op. cit., p. 5)
And Emile Verhaeren, a Belgian poet and critic, in 1885 praised Renoir's brushwork and palette:
Renoir's brush is superb. His art is most certainly of French lineage. He is descended from the magnificent eighteenth century, when Watteau, Fragonard, Greuze, Madame Vigée-Lebrun, Angelica Kauffmann, and Drouais were producing works of marvelous inventiveness. (Quoted in B.E. White, op. cit., p. 155)
In works such as La jeune fille au cygne, Renoir successfully recaptured the vivacity and joie-de-vivre of French Rococo art.
Renoir worked at tremendous speed and this contributed to the freshness of his portraits. Bailey has commented:
Renoir also executed his portraits a great deal more quickly than his fellow practitioners. Blanche claimed that Renoir was capable of painting a portrait in a single session, and that it was only to satisfy his sitters that he would ask for further appointments to "finish" the work. Renoir's brother made the same point to John Rewald in 1943. (C. Bailey, op. cit., p. 16)
In the present portrait, the lively surface and vivid application of the paint are due in no small part to the speed at which the master worked.
The identity of the girl has not been established with certainty. In the 1870s and 1880s, a number of rich and socially prominent families commissioned Renoir to make portraits of their children--the most famous examples are his portraits of the Bérard and Goujon children (fig. 2). It is conceivable that the girl in the present work is likewise from an aristocratic or haute-bourgeois family.
But it is also possible that the painting depicts one of Renoir's models. This hypothesis arises because she strongly resembles two of the models for the contemporaneous painting, Les grandes baigneuses (fig. 3), especially the one in the left foreground of that work. While it is true that this model in Les grandes baigneuses has black rather than chestnut hair, her features are nearly identical--the short, broad nose and bee-stung lips--and her coiffeur is also similar. The same young woman may also have sat for another portrait, Fillette au chapeau de paille, 1885 (Daulte, no. 481; Private Collection)
Renoir often made portraits of his models. Bailey has written about this aspect of the artist's oeuvre:
The distinctions between genre and portraiture were blurred in Renoir's work early on, yet it is clear that he conceived of them as quite separate activities. At some remove from his commissioned portraits, however informal, are the plentiful genre paintings of the 1870s that show...young women in domestic, if ill-defined, settings... Thus were the adolescents of Montmartre transformed into amiable Parisiennes, whose modernity and plebeian allure found favour both with Durand-Ruel and with Renoir's progressive collectors. They were often intimates of the artist...Renoir's fleshy models at Montmartre...professionals who worked for an array of artists on the Right Bank. (C. Bailey, op. cit., p. 13)
But while we cannot be sure about the identity of the girl, there can be no doubt that the painting is a work of high artistic achievement by one of the greatest portraitists of the nineteenth century.
(fig. 1) Pierre-Auguste Renior, Portrait de Madame Léon Clapisson, 1883
The Art Institute, Chicago
(fig. 2) Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Fillette au cerceau, 1885
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
(fig. 3) Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Les grandes baigneuses, 1884-1887
Museum of Art, Philadelphia
Painted in 1886, the present work is a ravishingly beautiful image of a young, nubile girl. Dressed all in white, she is seated on a low divan; she leans forward slightly, one hand holding a letter in her lap, the other hand steadying her pose. Behind her is a golden oriental screen, whose only discernable feature is an elegant crane or heron at the right edge of the painting. The plumage of the crane is white, like the girl's dress, and the artist surely meant to equate the gracefulness of the girl and that of the bird.
The painting exemplifies characteristic components of Renoir's style as a portrait painter. The composition is pyramidal and centralized, giving the image a classic and harmonic structure. Renoir preferred this composition for portraits; examples of it abound throughout his oeuvre, from early pictures such as Mademoiselle Romaine Lascaux, 1864 (Daulte, no. 12; Cleveland Museum of Art) to late works like Tilla Durieux, 1914 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York); one close comparison is his painting of Madame Clapisson (fig. 1).
Another characteristic feature of the present picture is its brilliance and luminosity. Renoir prepared the ground of the painting with a rich, thick layer of white; in addition, he mixed white into nearly all the pigments, and virtually eliminated black from the palette, using blue and lavender instead for the shadowing. The result is a high-valued image of extraordinary radiance.
The luminosity of Renoir's pictures formed a striking contrast with contemporary portraiture, which typically relied on darker, more sober, hues. (One need only compare Renoir with Manet or Bazille to see the difference.) Colin Bailey has commented:
What distinguishes them [Renoir's portraits] from those of Renoir's contemporaries is the extraordinary light with which they are imbued, "the natural light of day penetrating and influencing all things," which transforms and radicalizes Renoir's figures set in interiors, both in his portraiture and in his genre painting... [This] use of natural light...is at the heart of Renoir's practice as a figure painter, and it accounts for much of the bewilderment with which his early work was received. For Mallarmé's perceptive comment on La Loge--"this scene is fantastically illuminated by an incongruous daylight"--could be applied to nearly all of Renoir's portraits. (Ibid., pp. 21-25)
Certainly, this is true of the present painting. Although the portrait is set in an interior, the ambient glow surrounding the girl is so strong that one is tempted to think that she is outside. The portrait of Madame Clapisson has exactly the same effect. One factor contributing to the radiance in these works is Renoir's depiction of the background in terms of patches of color and light: the pigments are applied in areas of allied color, and the brushwork is open and active. The variegated background of La jeune fille au cygne is typical of Renoir's most attractive paintings from this era. Another example of this is found in the painting Filette au cerceau (fig. 2).
The distinctive radiance of Renoir's palette was due in part to his response to French Rococo painting. Renoir adored the eighteenth-century masters Watteau, Fragonard and Boucher. In a letter to Durand-Ruel in 1885, he wrote:
I've taken up again the old sweet and light way of painting... It's nothing new; it's a sequel to eighteenth-century paintings... This is to explain my new technique (Fragonard, but not so good)... Believe me, I'm not comparing myself to an eighteenth-century master. But I have to explain to you in what direction I'm working. (Quoted in B.E. White, Renoir, His Life, Art and Letters, New York, 1984, pp. 157-158)
Others independently made the same connection. In 1877 the critic Burty wrote:
To discover a similar sort of portrait painting, one would have to go back to the spirited sketches of Fragonard...for a temper that is so quintessentially French. (Quoted in C. Bailey, op. cit., p. 5)
And Emile Verhaeren, a Belgian poet and critic, in 1885 praised Renoir's brushwork and palette:
Renoir's brush is superb. His art is most certainly of French lineage. He is descended from the magnificent eighteenth century, when Watteau, Fragonard, Greuze, Madame Vigée-Lebrun, Angelica Kauffmann, and Drouais were producing works of marvelous inventiveness. (Quoted in B.E. White, op. cit., p. 155)
In works such as La jeune fille au cygne, Renoir successfully recaptured the vivacity and joie-de-vivre of French Rococo art.
Renoir worked at tremendous speed and this contributed to the freshness of his portraits. Bailey has commented:
Renoir also executed his portraits a great deal more quickly than his fellow practitioners. Blanche claimed that Renoir was capable of painting a portrait in a single session, and that it was only to satisfy his sitters that he would ask for further appointments to "finish" the work. Renoir's brother made the same point to John Rewald in 1943. (C. Bailey, op. cit., p. 16)
In the present portrait, the lively surface and vivid application of the paint are due in no small part to the speed at which the master worked.
The identity of the girl has not been established with certainty. In the 1870s and 1880s, a number of rich and socially prominent families commissioned Renoir to make portraits of their children--the most famous examples are his portraits of the Bérard and Goujon children (fig. 2). It is conceivable that the girl in the present work is likewise from an aristocratic or haute-bourgeois family.
But it is also possible that the painting depicts one of Renoir's models. This hypothesis arises because she strongly resembles two of the models for the contemporaneous painting, Les grandes baigneuses (fig. 3), especially the one in the left foreground of that work. While it is true that this model in Les grandes baigneuses has black rather than chestnut hair, her features are nearly identical--the short, broad nose and bee-stung lips--and her coiffeur is also similar. The same young woman may also have sat for another portrait, Fillette au chapeau de paille, 1885 (Daulte, no. 481; Private Collection)
Renoir often made portraits of his models. Bailey has written about this aspect of the artist's oeuvre:
The distinctions between genre and portraiture were blurred in Renoir's work early on, yet it is clear that he conceived of them as quite separate activities. At some remove from his commissioned portraits, however informal, are the plentiful genre paintings of the 1870s that show...young women in domestic, if ill-defined, settings... Thus were the adolescents of Montmartre transformed into amiable Parisiennes, whose modernity and plebeian allure found favour both with Durand-Ruel and with Renoir's progressive collectors. They were often intimates of the artist...Renoir's fleshy models at Montmartre...professionals who worked for an array of artists on the Right Bank. (C. Bailey, op. cit., p. 13)
But while we cannot be sure about the identity of the girl, there can be no doubt that the painting is a work of high artistic achievement by one of the greatest portraitists of the nineteenth century.
(fig. 1) Pierre-Auguste Renior, Portrait de Madame Léon Clapisson, 1883
The Art Institute, Chicago
(fig. 2) Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Fillette au cerceau, 1885
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
(fig. 3) Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Les grandes baigneuses, 1884-1887
Museum of Art, Philadelphia