Portrait of a Young Girl, circa 1895
Oil on canvas.
Signed lower right.
Oil on canvas.
Signed lower right.
H_40 cm W_27,7 cm
Provenance :
- former Ambroise Vollard collection
- acquired from Ambroise Vollard by the father of the present owners
- private collection
Bibliography : Ambroise Vollard, Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Tableaux, Pastels et Dessins (Edition, 1989) (1919), no. 1434 (ill. p. 296).
We thank Pascal Perrin of the Wildenstein Plattner Institute for confirming the Ambroise Vollard Archive number.
This work is registered in the Ambroise Vollard archives.
A certificate of authenticity from the Wildenstein Plattner Institute will be given to the buyer.
"I fight with my figures until they become one with the landscape that serves as their background, and I want one to feel that they are not flat."
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
A painter of figures
For more than fifty years, Pierre-Auguste Renoir explored the genre of portraiture, boldly pursuing his experiments, determined to become - as he explained to Claude Monet in January 1884 - a "painter of figures."
The work we are presenting is part of a new period in which Renoir adopted a more supple and unctuous style, in which the figures are drawn with greater fluidity and transparency. The portrait is as if coated with tender colours. A coloured mist that subjugates us like a dream that inhabits us and overwhelms us with softness.
"Renoir liked to quote Pascal's thought: "There is only one thing that interests man, that is man". It is for this reason, no doubt, that the painter of the Moulin de la
Galette and The Boaters' Lunch gave a predominant place to the human figure in his work. Unlike Sisley or Guillaumin, who showed a passionate and almost exclusive love of nature, Renoir was mainly tempted by the portrait. (...) Men's, women's and children's faces alternate with nudes, bathers, indoor or outdoor scenes with one, two or more figures, caught in a moment of contemplation or in a familiar occupation."
Auguste Renoir, François Daulte, Edition Durand-Ruel.
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