Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

La leon d'ecriture

Details
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)
Renoir, P.-A.
La leon d'ecriture
signed 'Renoir' (upper right)
oil on canvas
16 x 12 in. (41.5 x 32.2 cm.)
Painted in 1895
Provenance
Galerie Durand-Ruel, Paris.
Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris (by 1906).
Galerie Paul Rosenberg, Paris.
Sam Salz, Inc., New York.
Jerome K. Ohrbach, Los Angeles (acquired from the above, 1958); sale, Sotheby's, New York, 13 November 1990, lot 6.
Exhibited
Paris, Galerie Durand-Ruel, 1901.
Paris, Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, 1910.
New York, Galerie Paul Rosenberg, 1941.

Lot Essay

This painting will be reproduced in the Renoir catalogue raisonn from Franois Daulte being prepared by the Wildenstein Institute.

By 1895 Renoir was beginning to enjoy his first real taste of success. The structured classicism of the works of the previous decade such as his Les grandes baigneuses (Daulte no. 514; Philadelphia Museum of Art) of 1887-1888 had given way to a more luminous, freely brushed technique. It was also during this period that he began to devote a great deal of time to capturing poignant moments of domestic tranquility.

In the present painting, Renoir depicts the intimate scene of a reading lesson in a carefully arranged composition with a clearly classical tangibility. The iconography of girls engaged in reading, drawing, sewing and arranging flowers became a dominant motif of his oeuvre in the mid-1890s and Renoir was able to achieve a natural effect by not posing his models. The colors are carefully set against one another, the brilliant red of the young girl's blouse and her blond hair juxtaposed against the deep blue of the older girl's shirt and the green wall behind them.

The older girl in La leon d'ecriture is most likely Gabrielle Renard, who became a favorite model for the artist when she joined the Renoir household in August 1894 to assist Madame Renoir, her cousin, who was pregnant with the Renoirs' second child Jean.

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