Pierre-Auguste Renoir Lot n° 709

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - Portrait de Jeune Fille (Brune). Oil on canvas. (Ca. 1909-1912). Approx. 22 x 20 cm. Signed upper right. - Late work, painted in the south of France in Cagnes-sur-Mer - Depicted is probably Gabrielle Renard, Renoir's favorite model after 1900 - Intimate portrait, symbol of Renoir's feminine ideal "I could not yet walk when I already loved women." Pierre-Auguste Renoir Pierre-Auguste Renoir, one of France's most popular artists, loved women. For him, they were an embodiment of art par excellence. Female portraits accordingly form an important part of the Impressionist artist's oeuvre. He tenderly captured a soft, light femininity in pastel tones. Towards the end of the 19th century, his models increasingly lost their individual facial features and physicality. From 1900 on, Renoir's female figures show a type of female beauty preferred by the artist, without any particular features. In many of the late paintings, it is therefore difficult to determine the model with certainty. Most likely, our portrait is of Gabrielle Renard. She arrives in Paris in 1894 as a fifteen-year-old from a small village to work as a domestic helper and nanny for the Renoir family. She will remain with the family for over twenty years. With her simple, rural and uneducated background, Gabrielle embodies Renoir's desired vision of the ideal woman: "I like them best when they can't read and wipe their little ones' bottoms with their own hands," he says blatantly. Gabrielle becomes his favorite model in over two hundred paintings, whether as a caring Venus, in erotic poses, or as a generic portrait of a woman. When Renoir moved to Cagnes-sur-Mer in 1907 in search of a mild climate to remedy his arthritis, Gabrielle accompanied the Renoirs and became, in a sense, a member of the family. In the present painting, the model lowers her gaze - or has she closed her eyes in a moment of contemplation and pause? The lack of eye contact with the viewer invites attentive study of the painterly realization. Thus the eye lingers on the reflections of light, the violet sheen of the dark hair, the white flecks on the cheekbones, the light brushstrokes around the nose and mouth. Plastic pushes the left shoulder of the woman in the foreground and out of the picture to the viewer. Through the narrow neckline, we seem to be standing close to the model, able to look over her shoulder. Renoir was a master of these intimate female scenes. Through them, the artist imagined, the man can participate in the female natural order of instinct, feeling and intuition. An expert opinion was requested from the Wildenstein Plattner Institute. It was not available at press time. According to Sotheby's, the work was to be included in François Daulte's planned catalog raisonné (No. III, Figures 1906-1919) in 1989. Provenance: Galerie Drouant-David, Paris 1949; private collection, Belgium; Sotheby's, London 5.4.1989, lot 107; private collection, Monaco. Taxation: Differential tax plus 7% VAT: Margin Scheme (non EU).