Impressionism by Nathalia Brodskaya

Author:Nathalia Brodskaya [Brodskaïa, Nathalia]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781783103881
Publisher: Parkstone International
Published: 2014-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

86. Pierre Auguste Renoir, The Sisleys (The Fiancés), c.1868.

Oil on canvas, 106 x 74 cm.

Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne.

87. Pierre Auguste Renoir,

At the Inn of Mother Anthony, 1866.

Oil on canvas. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.

88. Pierre Auguste Renoir,

A Waitress at Duval’s Restaurant, c.1875.

Oil on canvas, 100.3 x 71.4 cm.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

About 1866 Renoir depicted that same inn in the striking painting At the Inn of Mother Anthony.The scene Renoir recreated on a large canvas, about two metres high, was not invented. That was how it was when they all gathered at Marlotte. “In the picture painted at Mère Anthony’s,” Jean Renoir tells us, “you can recognise Sisley in the standing figure, and Pissarro in the one with his back to you. The clean-shaven character is Frank Lamy; in the depth of the scene, with her back to you, is Madame Anthony; in the left foreground is the serving-girl Nana.

From this moment on, Renoir’s friends became regular features of all his paintings. The colour scheme of his work had still not become impressionistically light. It is more reminiscent of the bituminous tones of Courbet or the brownish hue of Fantin-Latour’s group portraits that makes them like old nineteenth-century photographs. The construction of the painting is remarkable, though: the figures of the servant-girl and the seated gentleman, both facing the viewer and both cut off at the vertical edge of the canvas, and the group of figures disposed almost in a semicircle create the sense of a real space. And that achieved by a twenty-five-year-old artist two years before Manet produced his Luncheon in the Studio. In this period Renoir produced a large number of portraits. It was then more than ever that he painted Monet and Sisley, created his portrait of Sisley and his wife, and another of William Sisley, the artist’s father. Renoir and Bazille painted each other in the studio they shared. Renoir often depicted the artist Jules Le Cœur with whom he became friendly at that time and in whose house he frequently stayed at Marlotte. Researchers into Renoir’s work believe that it is Le Cœur, and not Sisley, who is shown standing in At the Inn of Mother Anthony. Thanks to Le Cœur, Renoir began to get commissions for portraits and this subsequently became his main source of income. And, most important of all, not without the indirect involvement of Le Cœur, Renoir acquired his first muse. The sister of Le Cœur’s young lady, a girl named Lise Tréhot, became Renoir’s girlfriend. Lise did more than just pose for Renoir from 1865 to 1872. She became the first model of that Renoiresque world that the artist began to create. A very young Lise is depicted at her needlework in 1866, in some way calling to mind the models of Vermeer of whom Renoir was fond.

That same year, 1867, he painted Lise with a Sunshade. This plein-air painting, with a soft shadow on the face and the pink tone of the body shining through the thin fabric, has something in

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