New Acquisition to the Moorehead Showhouse
I love Rub ‘n Buff
I covered the picture in several coats of Mod Podge to give it more of a canvas-y effect
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)
Oil on canvas
Signed and dated ‘Renoir.03.’ (lower right)
25¾ x 61¼ in. (65.3 x 155.3 cm.)
Painted in 1903
Price Realized
$10,162,500
Estimate
$7,000,000 - $9,000,000
Provenance
Galerie Durand-Ruel et Cie., Paris (acquired from the artist, July 1907).
Goldschmidt-Rothschild, Berlin.
Jos Hessel, Paris.
Durand-Ruel Galleries, New York (acquired from the above, August 1926).
M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., New York.
Anon. sale, Christie’s, New York, 16 May 1977, lot 32.
Acquired at the above sale by the late owners.
Acquired by Eloise Moorehead, by cutting image out of catalog for the
Impressionist/ Modern Evening Sale , Christie’s, New York, 4 May 2010,
lot 34.
Notes
Renoir’s particular success in this picture owes much to the earthy and winsome appeal of his model. Devotees of this artist’s work will instantly recognize that the young woman in this painting is Fernande-Gabrielle Renard (see previous page), the best-known of the models who appeared in Renoir’s later paintings—she features in about two hundred of his works, far more than any other. Known as Gabrielle, or simply called “Ga,” she was born in 1878 in the town of Essoyes, which was also the birthplace of Renoir’s wife Aline. Gabrielle’s parents were the widow Marie Céleste Prélat, a grocer, and Charles Paul Renard, an unmarried wine-grower. Renard officially declared his paternity, and married the girl’s mother four years later; the couple subsequently also had a son. In May 1895 Marie Céleste’s son from her first marriage wedded Marie Victorine Maire, who was related to Aline, thus establishing a relationship between the Renoir and Renard families. To help care for the infant Jean, Aline asked Gabrielle, whom she could now consider a distant cousin, to join the Renoir household in the chateau des Brouillards, at 13, rue Girardon, Paris.
Gabrielle was a practical and hard-working country girl. Jean Renoir later recalled that “at ten she could tell the year of any wine, catch trout with her hands without getting caught by the game warden, tend the cows, help bleed the pigs, gather greens for rabbits and collect manure dropped by the horses as they came in from the fields—a treasure which everyone coveted” (Renoir, My Father, New York, 1958, p. 264). High-spirited and independent, but deeply loyal to her adoptive family, Gabrielle became an indispensable helpmate in the daily life of the Renoir home, especially after the artist purchased a house in Essoyes, where Gabrielle was completely in her element. She was devoted to Jean, her chief responsibility, and became his surrogate mother. Gabrielle’s warmly glowing presence enlivens many of the artist’s most charming domestic scenes during this period—she crouches in the foreground, with the toddler Jean in her protective grasp, in La famille d’artiste, 1896 (Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania).
Several years later Renoir began to paint Gabrielle in the nude; she appears half-length with her breasts exposed in Gabrielle à la rose (La Sicilienne), circa 1899 (exh. cat., op. cit., 2009, no. 23). Renoir had rented a summer house in Magagnosc, near Grasse. As Jean Renoir recalled, “It was in that house that Gabrielle began posing in the nude for the first time. La Boulangère [Marie Dupuis, a servant who joined the Renoir household in 1899] had a cold, and Renoir had tried in vain to get a model from Grasse. It was the rose gathering season for the perfume industry, and all the young people in the vicinity were employed. At the same time, it is possible that the prospect of appearing naked in front of a gentleman frightened many of the girls… My mother finally had the idea of getting Gabrielle as a substitute. She had just turned twenty and she was in the flower of youth. She was accustomed to seeing her friends pose in the nude that she took the suggestion as a matter of course. She had already appeared in countless pictures, but always fully clothed and always with me” (op. cit., pp. 365-366).
Much of the charm of Renoir’s nudes derives from the fact that the young women—or even girls in their late teens—are pretty, in the bloom of health and full of high spirits. They are delectably full-figured in a natural way; the artist preferred the “girl next-door” as his model. Ambroise Vollard commented that “If Renoir used his servants for his models, it was simply because he disliked nothing so much as the ‘professional.’ And after he had got a model ‘well-worked into his brushes,’ was a great annoyance for him to change” (Renoir, An Intimate Record, New York, 1925, p. 83).
Renoir placed his easel very close to edge of the divan with cushions on which he posed Gabrielle. There is minimal intervening space in the foreground between the viewer and the model, and the eye senses that she is virtually life-size, all contributing to the uncanny sense of presence that Gabrielle projects from within the confines of the composition. She has drawn up her legs slightly, creating a curving S-shape that acts in counterpoint with the relatively flat and rectilinear space around her. The subtle twists in the positioning of her legs and arms required Renoir to foreshorten her thighs and left upper arm, effects he brought off with masterly skill. Taking his cue from time-honored conventions for the depiction of the nude, Renoir allowed Gabrielle to cover her sex with a tastefully positioned piece of drapery, a measure which also made the picture suitably decorous for display in a public salon. The pink rose that Gabrielle wears in her hair accentuates her sultry allure; she often appears in Renoir’s pictures wearing one, as it contrasts seductively with her dark hair and eyes, lending her appearance a decidedly Mediterranean, even Spanish air. [source]
