Pierre-Auguste Renoir, (French, 1841-1919)

Jeune femme en buste

Jeune femme en buste
signed 'Renoir' (upper left)
oil on canvas
17.7 x 11.7cm (6 15/16 x 4 5/8in).
Painted circa 1900

This work will be included in the critical catalogue of the works of Pierre-Auguste Renoir currently being prepared by the Wildenstein Institute.

Provenance
Private collection, Southern Germany.
Acquired from the above by the present owner.

Exhibited
Lodève, Musée de Lodève, Louis Valtat à l'aube du fauvisme, 2 June - 16 Octobre 2011, no. 79.

Literature
A. Vollard, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paintings, Pastels and Drawings, San Francisco 1989, no. 1552 (illustrated p. 320).
G.-P. & M. Dauberville, Renoir, catalogue raisonné des tableaux, pastels, dessins et aquarelles, Vol. V, 1911 - 1919 & Ier supplément, Paris, 2014, no. 4491 (illustrated p. 532).

'The nudes, especially, are powerfully assertive, even in the rapidly executed sketches. They are hymns to light and color, to youth and life' (L. Venturi quoted in G. Muehsam (ed.), French Painters and Paintings from the Fourteenth Century to Post-Impressionism: A Library of Art Criticism, New York, 1970, p. 516).

Jeune femme en buste illustrates Renoir's enduring fondness for the female form, stemming from his early portraits and life studies. The artist firmly believed that academic rigour was required in order to excel artistically, and he would spend hours each day sketching the human figure, telling a young Berthe Morisot in 1886, 'that the nude is absolutely indispensable as an art form' (G. Muehsam, ibid., p. 513). Renoir had proven himself a successful portrait painter in the 1870s, generating enough income to fund his formative travels in the 1880s. Youthful models were chosen for his portraits and nudes in the 1890s, and towards the end of his life these figures became more ample, looking back once more to the nudes of Rubens and Titian he so admired.

Painted circa 1900, Jeune femme en buste beautifully illustrates the artist's mature style, which acknowledged the classical influences of his youth and his later travels, yet retained the Impressionist style he so excelled in. The present work shows Renoir's oft-repeated criterion for judging a model, that her skin should 'take the light' (Exh. cat, Renoir, London, 1985, p. 16) her forehead, nose and upper lip are picked out with highlights, and the golden sweeps of her hair are flecked with dabs of sunlight but unlike earlier compositions her softly modelled figure holds its form. Earlier nudes from the artist's true Impressionist period such as Etude. Torse, effet de soleil almost took second place to their surroundings, as Renoir's feathery brushwork lent equal importance to the effects of light on the figure and the background.

This contributed to Renoir's growing unease with Impressionism's lack of form and definition, where 'towards 1883 a sort of break occurred in my work. I had reached the end of Impressionism and came to the conclusion that I could neither paint nor draw' (P.-A. Renoir quoted in F. Daulte, Pierre-Auguste Renoir: Watercolours, pastels and drawings in colour, London, 1959, p. 11). The artist set out to rediscover the works of masters such as Titian, Rubens, Watteau, Fragonard and Delacroix, whose works he had studied at the Louvre as a young student. He made two pivotal trips in 1881, exploring Algeria and Italy, where he took in the frescoes of Pompeii and the art of the Renaissance, admiring the emphasis on harmony, volume and sculpture. Concluding his travels with a sojourn in Provence with Cézanne, Renoir turned from Impressionism to adopt a more precise and linear style. In works from the mid-1880s such as Les Grandes Baigneuses, we can see his new monumental figures, frozen mid-movement and sharply delineated. Such compositions were poorly received by critics however, as Renoir's previously painterly style suddenly 'threatened to give way to rigid routine' (G. Adriani, Renoir, Cologne, 1999, p. 45). By 1900, the time the present work was painted, Renoir had evolved his mature style to combine the influences and lessons of Classicism and Impressionism. In Jeune femme en buste we therefore see a return to his characteristically soft modelling, yet the girl is posed with a robe draped over one shoulder, turned at a slight angle towards the viewer. The deliberately vague background is typical of Renoir's classical period, as is the pretty blush, rosebud mouth and voluptuous curves of the artist's idealised woman.

The healthy girls and women of Renoir's compositions formed a striking contrast to the artist's own increasingly frail form. Suffering from rheumatism from around 1898 onwards, he lost weight even as his subjects grew fleshier: 'Renoir continued to derive great joy from the rich, supple curves of his nudes, whom 'the gods had spared these horrid sharp angles'' (G. Adriani, ibid., p. 298). These curves also serve to create a rhythm and underlying harmony in his paintings, thus the orb of the model's breast in the present work is echoed by the sweep of the robe, the gentle curve of her shoulder and the rounded brushwork which models her face and hair.

The artist's palette also serves to create harmony across the work. In the early years of the new century Renoir would vary his pigments according to the subject and mood he wished to evoke, but would use only a few bright tones as carefully considered accents: 'executing a portrait in 1901, he placed a pink ribbon in his sitter's hair and commented: 'Now I've got hold of my composition. All the colours will act in relation to that pink, the problem of colour is resolved'' (Exh. cat, op. cit., p. 268). Jeune femme en buste appears to centre around the rose-red lips of the model, echoed in the pink tones of her cheeks and chest. As a colourist, Renoir strove to use his palette to recreate the female form as he beheld her: 'I want a red to be sonorous, to sound, like a bell; if it doesn't turn out that way, I put more reds and other colors till I get it. [...] I look at a nude, there are myriads of tiny tints. I must find the ones that will make the flesh on my canvas live and quiver' (P.-A. Renoir quoted in G. Muehsam, op. cit., p. 511).