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Lot Essay
The present painting of a young girl lost in reverie dates to a key transitional moment in Renoir's career. By 1884, the artist had to come to feel, as he later told the dealer Ambroise Vollard, that he "had reached the end of Impressionism" (quoted in J. House, Renoir, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 1985, p. 241). Over the course of the next three years, Renoir increasingly turned away from Impressionism, which he had begun to view as too imprecise and lacking in form, and concentrated on a more solidly modeled, classicizing conception of the figure. John House has written, "In technique, composition and subject matter Renoir was deliberately moving away from any suggestion of the fleeting or the contingent, away from the Impressionist preoccupation with the captured instant, towards a more timeless vision of woman" (ibid., p. 242). In marked contrast to other periods in his career, Renoir traveled little between 1884 and 1887; the stimulus of new landscapes and novel effects was irrelevant-- even detrimental--to the pictorial problems that he was exploring. He also exhibited only occasionally, opting not to submit to the Salon between 1883 and 1890, nor to the final Impressionist group show in 1886. Instead, he focused on consolidating what Pissarro described in a letter to his son Lucien as Renoir's "new manner" (quoted in C. Bailey, Renoir's Portraits: Impressions of an Age, exh. cat., National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 1997, p. 19). The culminating work of this period is the monumental Baigneuses (Philadelphia Museum of Art), which was exhibited at the Galerie Georges Petit in the spring of 1887.
Renoir once proclaimed that "in literature as well as in painting, talent is shown only by the treatment of the feminine figures" (quoted in J. House, op. cit., p. 16), and one of the principal problems with which he grappled during the mid-1880s was how to transform the modern woman into l'éternel feminin. The present painting exemplifies the resolution that he achieved. Rather than a genuine likeness of a known sitter, it depicts an anonymous model whose physiognomy is made to conform to Renoir's ideal type: rounded features, pearly pink skin, a snub nose, bee-stung lips, and wide eyes. Whereas Renoir's depictions of women in the 1870s typically presented them as the central element in the visual pageantry of the modern world, on public display in stylish fashions, paintings like the present one eschew any such reference to contemporary life. Moreover, in lieu of the full- or three-quarter-length format that Renoir had preferred in his earlier figure paintings, he opted here to depict his model from a relatively close vantage point, against a flat, indistinct background that contrasts with the strong contours of her face. The result is to instill the painting with a timeless, classical quality, which is underscored by the contemplative, almost melancholy, attitude of the young girl.
Renoir once proclaimed that "in literature as well as in painting, talent is shown only by the treatment of the feminine figures" (quoted in J. House, op. cit., p. 16), and one of the principal problems with which he grappled during the mid-1880s was how to transform the modern woman into l'éternel feminin. The present painting exemplifies the resolution that he achieved. Rather than a genuine likeness of a known sitter, it depicts an anonymous model whose physiognomy is made to conform to Renoir's ideal type: rounded features, pearly pink skin, a snub nose, bee-stung lips, and wide eyes. Whereas Renoir's depictions of women in the 1870s typically presented them as the central element in the visual pageantry of the modern world, on public display in stylish fashions, paintings like the present one eschew any such reference to contemporary life. Moreover, in lieu of the full- or three-quarter-length format that Renoir had preferred in his earlier figure paintings, he opted here to depict his model from a relatively close vantage point, against a flat, indistinct background that contrasts with the strong contours of her face. The result is to instill the painting with a timeless, classical quality, which is underscored by the contemplative, almost melancholy, attitude of the young girl.