Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

This painting will be included in the forthcoming catalogue critique of Pierre-Auguste Renoir being prepared by the Wildenstein Institute established from the archives of François Daulte, Durand-Ruel, Venturi, Vollard and Wildenstein.

In the 1890s Renoir had developed a very intimate style of portraiture that was well suited to portraying the family members, friends and neighbours he asked to pose for him. The sitter for the present work is Gabrielle Renard, who at the age of 16 joined the Renoirs' household in 1894, a month before Jean was born. Gabrielle remained with the family for the next twenty years, until her marriage to the American painter Conrad Slade in 1912. She soon became indispensable to the Renoirs, not only looking after the children and, later, the increasingly infirm artist, but also modelling frequently for Renoir, both as the protagonist of his domestic scenes and as the voluptuous nude which so preoccupied the artist post-1900.

When painting a female figure, Renoir sought to reveal that which still remained in her from the child within - the luminous softness of the skin, her delicate flesh, and the character of her inner youth. As George Rivière was to comment, 'In Renoir's figure painting, portraiture deserves a place unto itself. For no other artist has looked so deeply into his sitter's soul, nor captured its essence with such economy' (quoted in C. Bailey, Renoir's Portraits, Impression of an Age, Ottawa, 1997, p. 1).