The Ambitious Artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Each week for the duration of the exhibition, we’ll focus on one work of art from Renoir and Friends: Luncheon of the Boating Party, on view October 7, 2017-January 7, 2018.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Self-Portrait, c. 1875

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Self-Portrait (Autoportrait), c. 1875. Oil on canvas, 15 3⁄8 × 12 7⁄16 in. Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA

In a rare self-portrait, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) captures the ambitious young man that he was in his mid-thirties, struggling to make a living as a painter. In the early to mid-1870s, Renoir had a hard time selling his work. His style, which we find so alive and full of light―was considered loose and unfinished by many established critics. It was an arduous time for the avant-garde Impressionists (and for Renoir in particular, who was one of the founding members of the group), strained by lack of sales an deplorably low prices. While in retrospect it was the great decade of Impressionism, when the group was at its most cohesive, by its end there were challenges to this cohesion. Renoir shifted his sights from the small independent Impressionist group exhibitions to the huge official state-run Salon, though it may have meant unfortunate placement and the certainty of being exhibited among pieces by painters who subscribed to traditional subjects and established techniques. Although some of Renoir’s paintings had been accepted at the Salon in previous years, this had not resulted in any significant increase in sales or recognition. But Renoir was keenly aware of the value of personal contacts and social connections, and carefully cultivated the support of writers who understood and praised his work and collectors who purchased, and soon, in greater numbers, commissioned portraits and decorations.

Just a few years later, as he approached his fortieth birthday, he determined not to put off any longer the challenge of a complex group composition to be painted on the terrace of the Maison Fournaise: Luncheon of the Boating Party.

Renoir and Women Models

Each week for the duration of the exhibition, we’ll focus on one work of art from Renoir and Friends: Luncheon of the Boating Party, on view October 7, 2017-January 7, 2018.

Nadar (Gaspar-Félix Tournachon), Angèle, Modern silver gelatin print from an original of c. 1878

Nadar (Gaspar-Félix Tournachon), Angèle, Modern silver gelatin print from an original of c. 1878, Caisse Nationale des Monuments Historiques et des Sites, Paris

Renoir celebrated not only natural female beauty but also a woman’s attire and the way in which the line of a dress or shape of a hat could flatter her appearance. The son of a tailor and a dressmaker, he naturally came by this appreciation for line, texture, and style. Friends and mistresses would pose for him as a favor, but he also hired models in Montmartre. Among those who appear in Renoir’s work numerous times in the late 1870s and early 1880s were three actresses—Ellen Andrée, Angèle (who also made a living as a florist), and Jeanne Samary.

Angèle may have modeled for the woman in the lower right corner of Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party. Her name was associated with the painting as early as 1891. It is possible, however, since the woman in the painting also resembles Ellen Andrée, that Andrée and Angèle modeled interchangeably as Renoir worked on his grand composition.

Charles Ephrussi: Collector and Critic

Each week for the duration of the exhibition, we’ll focus on one work of art from Renoir and Friends: Luncheon of the Boating Party, on view October 7, 2017-January 7, 2018.

Critic and collector Charles Ephrussi was vital to Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s emerging reputation at the time leading up to the creation of Luncheon of the Boating Party. Born in Odessa (formerly Russia, now Ukraine) in 1849 to a family of grain exporters who became international bankers, Charles Ephrussi studied there and in Vienna, arriving in Paris in 1871. Almost immediately his travels, studies, and friendships led him to collecting, beginning with Italian Renaissance works, 16th-century tapestries, and Japanese lacquer boxes; then expanding his collecting to include Meissen porcelain and 18th-century French decorative arts, while never neglecting the art of his time. He became an early and significant collector of Impressionist painting, and reviewed the Impressionist exhibitions of 1880 and 1881 for the Gazette des beaux-arts, a publication for which he became its co-owner in 1885 and its director from 1894 until he died in 1905.

Renoir and Friends features works from Charles Ephrussi’s collection, including this painting by Édouard Manet, whom Ephrussi greatly admired. Ephrussi purchased A Bunch of Asparagus for a higher price than the artist expected. In gratitude, Manet created an additional painting of a single stalk of asparagus (also in the exhibition) as a present for Ephrussi, saying, “There was one missing from your bunch.”

Édouard Manet, A Bunch of Asparagus, 1880

Édouard Manet, A Bunch of Asparagus (Une botte d’asperges), 1880. Oil on canvas, 18 1⁄8 × 21 11⁄16 in. Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud Cologne