.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Impressionist paintings are characterized by warm, luminous color and lively brushwork—as well as the artist's evident pleasure in feminine beauty. As the artist's son, Jean Renoir, wrote in his memoir, “Along with the roses, which grew almost wild in Les Collettes [the artist’s home in the south of France],” a young female model “was one of the vital elements which helped Renoir to interpret on his canvas the tremendous cry of love he uttered at the end of his life” (Renoir, My Father, New York, 2001, p. 426). The art historian Colin Bailey summarized the penultimate years of the artist’s career this way: “Renoir is the painter of ‘jeunes filles en fleurs’”—that is, young girls in bloom (“Late Renoir” in The Burlington Magazine, vol. 152, no. 1287, 2010, p. 410). Painted in 1907, Jeune fille assise tenant une rose is a mature expression of this central theme in Renoir’s oeuvre.
Renoir’s subject wears an elegant, peach-colored dress with billowing sleeves, accented by several strands of white pearls around her neck. The volume of her dress is tailored by a bright blue sash around her slender waist, which echoes the sapphire blue color of her heavy-lidded eyes. The model’s casual hairstyle emphasizes her youth: her thick auburn hair, cascading down her shoulders in natural waves, is tucked behind her left ear with a pale pink ribbon. She sits casually on a simple wooden chair with her left arm resting on the back. In her right hand, she holds a robustly-pleated, pale pink rose. Renoir used the same deep pink pigment to paint the interior flower petals and the folds of her dress, as well as her flushed cheeks and lips. Indeed, for Renoir, the ripe rose was a perfect visual metaphor for youthful vitality.
He is truly the painter of women…and always elegant, with an exquisite visual sensibility...he also gives a sense of the form of the soul, all woman's inward musicality and bewitching mystery. Octave Mirbeau
In Jeune fille assise tenant une rose, Renoir invoked many of the conventions of traditional portraiture. The girl is pictured seated in an interior, cropped at the hips, and viewed from a three-quarter perspective. She is outfitted with a fashionable yet conservative dress, which implies contemporary, bourgeois individuality. Yet this jeune fille, like many of the other models who were featured in Renoir’s canvases, is not identified by name. Her specific facial features are ultimately subject to Renoir’s vision of ideal beauty.
The figure's form in the present painting was also a pretext for Renoir's painterly facture. Using soft, fluid brushstrokes, the artist conjured the impression of a round, curvaceous body, clad in soft, shiny fabric, on the two-dimensional surface of a canvas. Bailey described this unique quality of Renoir’s painting technique as follows: “Form emerges with absolute assurance from a vortex of inchoate, thinly applied strokes...The abbreviation and extreme sketchiness of much of the canvas in no way detract from the consummate modeling of the woman’s face and torso, which impose themselves with absolute conviction”—exemplifying the artist’s “audace, abondance et générosité [audacity, abundance, and generosity]” (ibid., p. 411).
Renoir’s subject wears an elegant, peach-colored dress with billowing sleeves, accented by several strands of white pearls around her neck. The volume of her dress is tailored by a bright blue sash around her slender waist, which echoes the sapphire blue color of her heavy-lidded eyes. The model’s casual hairstyle emphasizes her youth: her thick auburn hair, cascading down her shoulders in natural waves, is tucked behind her left ear with a pale pink ribbon. She sits casually on a simple wooden chair with her left arm resting on the back. In her right hand, she holds a robustly-pleated, pale pink rose. Renoir used the same deep pink pigment to paint the interior flower petals and the folds of her dress, as well as her flushed cheeks and lips. Indeed, for Renoir, the ripe rose was a perfect visual metaphor for youthful vitality.
He is truly the painter of women…and always elegant, with an exquisite visual sensibility...he also gives a sense of the form of the soul, all woman's inward musicality and bewitching mystery. Octave Mirbeau
In Jeune fille assise tenant une rose, Renoir invoked many of the conventions of traditional portraiture. The girl is pictured seated in an interior, cropped at the hips, and viewed from a three-quarter perspective. She is outfitted with a fashionable yet conservative dress, which implies contemporary, bourgeois individuality. Yet this jeune fille, like many of the other models who were featured in Renoir’s canvases, is not identified by name. Her specific facial features are ultimately subject to Renoir’s vision of ideal beauty.
The figure's form in the present painting was also a pretext for Renoir's painterly facture. Using soft, fluid brushstrokes, the artist conjured the impression of a round, curvaceous body, clad in soft, shiny fabric, on the two-dimensional surface of a canvas. Bailey described this unique quality of Renoir’s painting technique as follows: “Form emerges with absolute assurance from a vortex of inchoate, thinly applied strokes...The abbreviation and extreme sketchiness of much of the canvas in no way detract from the consummate modeling of the woman’s face and torso, which impose themselves with absolute conviction”—exemplifying the artist’s “audace, abondance et générosité [audacity, abundance, and generosity]” (ibid., p. 411).