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Lot Essay
Between 1907 and 1911, Renoir painted several canvases that depict Gabrielle Renard, the principal model and muse of his late years, loosely clad in a semi-transparent white chemise. Gabrielle, a distant cousin of Renoir’s wife Aline, had joined the household in 1894 as the governess to the couple’s infant son Jean and quickly became an indispensable member of the family, as well as the artist’s studio assistant and favorite model. During the ensuing two decades, Renoir depicted Gabrielle reading, sewing, or caring for children; as a washerwoman in the French countryside and a Roman goddess in The Judgment of Paris; and very frequently as an object of erotic desire, as here. Gaston Bernheim de Villers described Gabrielle as “an extremely beautiful brunette—charming and intelligent. When you arrived for luncheon you were almost certain to find Renoir painting her, either in the nude or wearing transparent oriental robes” (quoted in Masterpieces from the David and Peggy Rockefeller Collection: Manet to Picasso, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1994, p. 75).
In the present scene, Gabrielle is clad much as Bernheim described—in an exotic-looking gown, and seated on a large pillow which adds an overtly non-Western overtone to the scene. During the 1870s, Renoir had painted several ambitious Orientalist studio scenes, including a free and somewhat risqué transposition of Delacroix’s masterpiece Les femmes d’Alger. “There isn’t a finer picture in the world,” the artist later told Vollard of Delacroix’s original. “How really Oriental those women are—the one who has a little rose in her hair for instance!” (quoted in Renoir in the 20th Century, exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2009, p. 294). In 1881-1882, Renoir followed in the footsteps of Delacroix and went to Algeria to paint, the only one of the Impressionists to experience this fabled region first-hand.
Although Renoir never again traveled outside of Europe, he re-visited Orientalist themes in his work repeatedly during the last decade of his career. North Africa was more fashionable than ever in France by this time, recalling the taste for Japonisme a generation earlier, and a new group of young avant-garde artists had begun to explore the region—most notably Matisse, who voyaged to Algiers and Biskra in 1906. In 1909, Renoir created a pair of large decorative panels for Maurice Gangnat, which depict dancing girls—Gabrielle with castanets, the ginger-haired Georgette with a tambourine—in sumptuous, Algerian-inspired costume. Between 1915 and 1919, after Gabrielle had left the household, he repeatedly posed his new model Dédée in a silk brocaded vest (a ghlila), a sheer white chemise, and a gold-colored turban. This is the ensemble, minus the vest, that she wears in his last major subject painting, Le Concert, a glowing testament to the artist’s lifelong affirmation of sensual beauty.
“Working with models upon a stage—with anchors in physical reality firmly fixed before his eyes—Renoir was able to break with reality, to create a world that could exist only in the studio and in his paintings,” Claudia Einecke has explained. “Paradoxically, it is precisely the material triggers of Renoir’s late costume pictures—the real models, the real furniture, the real costumes—that sent his imagined world to another register, one that is neither pure reality nor pure imagination, but the hybrid he described as his goal. In their dual nature as both representation and construct, these paintings offer a world that is particular unto itself. A world that only belongs to art” (ibid., p. 67).
These studio masquerades were a key source of inspiration for Matisse, nearly thirty years Renoir’s junior. Matisse met the Impressionist painter in late 1917, during his first winter’s stay on the Côte d’Azur, and visited him frequently at Cagnes until Renoir’s death two years later. In the context of the post-war rappel à l’ordre, Renoir’s return to an Orientalist iconography represented an affirmation of French tradition, providing a living link with Delacroix as well as the Ingresque tradition of studio Orientalism. Moreover, as Kirk Varnedoe observed, “Renoir’s canon of female beauty seemed to embody a special marriage between classicizing idealism and a distinctly modern, specifically French sense of sophisticated pleasure” (exh. cat., op. cit., 1994, p. 34).
In the present scene, Gabrielle is clad much as Bernheim described—in an exotic-looking gown, and seated on a large pillow which adds an overtly non-Western overtone to the scene. During the 1870s, Renoir had painted several ambitious Orientalist studio scenes, including a free and somewhat risqué transposition of Delacroix’s masterpiece Les femmes d’Alger. “There isn’t a finer picture in the world,” the artist later told Vollard of Delacroix’s original. “How really Oriental those women are—the one who has a little rose in her hair for instance!” (quoted in Renoir in the 20th Century, exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2009, p. 294). In 1881-1882, Renoir followed in the footsteps of Delacroix and went to Algeria to paint, the only one of the Impressionists to experience this fabled region first-hand.
Although Renoir never again traveled outside of Europe, he re-visited Orientalist themes in his work repeatedly during the last decade of his career. North Africa was more fashionable than ever in France by this time, recalling the taste for Japonisme a generation earlier, and a new group of young avant-garde artists had begun to explore the region—most notably Matisse, who voyaged to Algiers and Biskra in 1906. In 1909, Renoir created a pair of large decorative panels for Maurice Gangnat, which depict dancing girls—Gabrielle with castanets, the ginger-haired Georgette with a tambourine—in sumptuous, Algerian-inspired costume. Between 1915 and 1919, after Gabrielle had left the household, he repeatedly posed his new model Dédée in a silk brocaded vest (a ghlila), a sheer white chemise, and a gold-colored turban. This is the ensemble, minus the vest, that she wears in his last major subject painting, Le Concert, a glowing testament to the artist’s lifelong affirmation of sensual beauty.
“Working with models upon a stage—with anchors in physical reality firmly fixed before his eyes—Renoir was able to break with reality, to create a world that could exist only in the studio and in his paintings,” Claudia Einecke has explained. “Paradoxically, it is precisely the material triggers of Renoir’s late costume pictures—the real models, the real furniture, the real costumes—that sent his imagined world to another register, one that is neither pure reality nor pure imagination, but the hybrid he described as his goal. In their dual nature as both representation and construct, these paintings offer a world that is particular unto itself. A world that only belongs to art” (ibid., p. 67).
These studio masquerades were a key source of inspiration for Matisse, nearly thirty years Renoir’s junior. Matisse met the Impressionist painter in late 1917, during his first winter’s stay on the Côte d’Azur, and visited him frequently at Cagnes until Renoir’s death two years later. In the context of the post-war rappel à l’ordre, Renoir’s return to an Orientalist iconography represented an affirmation of French tradition, providing a living link with Delacroix as well as the Ingresque tradition of studio Orientalism. Moreover, as Kirk Varnedoe observed, “Renoir’s canon of female beauty seemed to embody a special marriage between classicizing idealism and a distinctly modern, specifically French sense of sophisticated pleasure” (exh. cat., op. cit., 1994, p. 34).