PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR

(1841-1919)

Profil de jeune fille

Footnotes

This work will be included in the forthcoming Pierre-Auguste Renoir Digital Catalogue Raisonné, currently being prepared under the sponsorship of the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, Inc.

Provenance
Galerie Durand-Ruel, Paris (acquired from the artist on May 23, 1898).
Vitale Bloch Collection, London (acquired from the above on March 8, 1923).
Captain Robert Langdon Douglas Collection, London.
Dr. Anton Frederik Philips Collection, Eindhoven and New York (by 1951).
Lock Galleries, New York.
Victoria Dreyfus Collection, New York, by 1976; her Estate sale, Christie's, New York, May 19, 1978, lot 16.
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner.

Exhibited
Manchester, Manchester City Art Gallery, Modern French Paintings, 1907 – 1908, no. 157 (titled 'Young Woman in Pink' and dated 1898).



Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted likenesses of young children throughout his career. Initially, these tended to be formal portraits. As he became more established as an artist, however, without any great need to accept paid commissions, he developed a new approach. He began concentrating less on an exact rendering of a child's face and more on capturing a sensibility or mood.

Featuring an auburn-haired girl in profile – very possibly a child of a housemaid – Profil de jeune fille (1895) is a beautiful manifestation of this shift: the subject's facial features are only partially defined and the ruffle apron she wears is blurred. With the rosy flush of her chubby cheeks, and her hair gathered in a top-knot bun, she bears a striking resemblance to the sitter in Renoir's Head of a Girl painted in 1898 (today part of the Tate collection in London).

Born in Limoges in 1841, Renoir moved to Paris with his family at the age of four. He apprenticed as a decorator of porcelain, before entering the atelier of the painter Charles Gleyre and then the École des Beaux-Arts. In the former, he met Claude Monet and Alfred Sisley, with whom he would go on to help launch the Impressionist movement in the early 1870s.

At the start of the following decade – after a trip to Italy, where he encountered works by Renaissance masters such as Titian and Raphael firsthand – Renoir moved away from Impressionism towards a more classical style. It was around this time also that he started a relationship with his model, Aline Charigot, who later became his wife. The couple would have three sons together: Pierre (b. 1885), Jean (b. 1894) and Claude (b. 1901).

According to a memoir about his father, written by Jean in adulthood, "the birth of my brother Pierre was to cause a definite revolution in Renoir's life. The theories aired at the Nouvelles Athènes (a Parisian café where the Impressionists had convened) were now made to seem unimportant by the dimples in a baby's bottom. As he eagerly sketched his son... he concentrated on rendering the velvety flesh of the child; and through this very submission, Renoir began to rebuild his inner world" (Jean Renoir, My Father, New York, 1962, p. 233).

In Jean's view, the depictions of children executed by the artist after 1885 were more intimate than those from before. Even when Renoir was portraying children other than his own, as was the case with Profil de jeune fille, there was a new-found tenderness to his imagery. He even began to engage himself in issues such as child welfare and education. He strongly disapproved, for example, of the "artificial" practice of bottle-feeding babies, believing that an infant should "bury its nose in its mother's breast, nuzzle it, and knead it with its chubby hand" (quoted in J. House, Renoir 1841-1919, Guernsey, 1988, p. 34).

By Renoir's day, France had introduced a standardized school system, something of which the artist was wary. He held comparable views to the 18th-century philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, particularly the belief that children should learn from the world around them – and be able to think for themselves – rather than from rote learning in a classroom. As a consequence, he refused to allow his children to participate in formal education until they reached the age of 10. In his memoir, Jean shared an anecdote from his childhood about the son of the Renoirs' family chef, who entered school at a much younger age than Pierre, him or Claude: "When [the boy] came home at night, [Renoir] would never fail to warn him not to believe the lies he might hear from the clerics. 'If they tell you the earth is flat, do as Galileo did. Keep quiet, and do your own thinking'" (quoted in My Father, New York, 1962, p. 321-2).

The element of warmth displayed by Renoir in that interaction with his chef's son is mirrored in the warmth displayed towards the girl in Profil de jeune fille. Her radiant complexion reveals a youthful vitality. Though subtly colored, the backdrop is featureless, the lack of details of the girl's surroundings adding to the sense of intimacy.

Renoir's exuberant brushstrokes in this picture, perhaps most visible in the mixed-color patterning of the subject's dress, are testament to an evolved style. Where in the 1880s, Renoir had been inspired by the elegant and restrained lines of the Renaissance masters, in the following decade he became steadily more interested in the example of the French 18th-century artists, Watteau and Fragonard, as the art historian John House explains: "His brushwork of the 1890s [shows] Fragonard's imprint in its increasingly rhythmic, cursive movements, which model form and create decorative pattern in the same gesture." (J. House, "Renoir's World", in Renoir, exh. cat., London, 1985, p. 250).

Profil de jeune fille has an impressive provenance. Its first recorded owner was the esteemed art historian, dealer and collector, Vitale Bloch, a large portion of whose collection would be bequeathed to the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen in Rotterdam. Its subsequent owner was Robert Langdon Douglas, a British art scholar who for many years served as director of the National Gallery of Ireland. The painting was later purchased by the successful US music publisher, Max Dreyfus. It was at the auction of the estate of Dreyfus and his wife Victoria – in 1976 – that Profil de jeune fille was acquired by its current owners. It comes to the market for the first time in almost half a century.