Self-portrait by Pierre-Auguste Renoir
By STAN PARCHIN
June 19, 2010
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| Pierre-Auguste Renoir (French, 1841-1919). Self-portrait (1889). Oil on canvas. 41.1 x 33 cm. Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. |
Frenchmen Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), Claude Monet (1840-1926), Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) and others introduced Europe to a new painting style that came to be called Impressionism. Characterized by expressive brushwork and a warm palette, their sketch-like compositions captured the spontaneity of everyday life. Renoir gradually distanced himself from his contemporaries after their first independent show in Paris (1874), an event resoundingly derided by one critic. He devoted the rest of his career to a renewed emphasis on portraiture, the female nude and subjects from classical mythology. The painter's Self-portrait (1899) in the widely-acclaimed exhibition Late Renoir (2009-10) is one example of novel directions the artist embarked upon during the last 30 years of his life.
Renoir's Early Career
A tailor by trade, Renoir's father relocated his family to Paris after the artist's birth in Limoges. At the nearby Palais du Louvre, the young Renoir developed his visual acuity by copying many of the collection's famous works. Apprenticed to a porcelain painter at 13 years of age, he publicly displayed his first oil on canvas at the Salon of 1864.
Renoir exhibited with the Impressionists from 1874 to 1877. Subsequent trips to locales within France, Algeria and Italy, coupled with a love of ancient and Renaissance art, influenced his decision to break with the unconventional group and its scenes of leisurely Parisians at dances, the theatre and the like. The Philadelphia Museum of Art's monumental Large Bathers (1884-87) was Renoir's bold proclamation of his freedom from what he felt was Impressionism's limited repertoire.
Self-portrait
Renoir's revised Self-portrait (1899) is one of two owned by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. A photograph of the bearded artist taken shortly after the painting's completion confirms that Renoir softened his face's wrinkles without having idealized his paralyzed right eye's appearance. He wears a painter's jacket, cotton shirt and cravat. A gray trilby or simple brimmed hat conceals the slightly vain artist's bald pate. Flourishes of red color and dancing figures gently emerge from the patterned wallpaper behind the subject.
The introspective likeness was executed two years before the rheumatic Renoir broke his right arm for a second time after falling off a bicycle. While completing the work, the painter underwent thermal treatment for his encroaching arthritis at Aix-les-Bains. The aged Renoir's serious demeanor in his Self-portrait contradicts descriptions of the personally private artist as having been active and gregarious despite his physical frailties.
Source
Bailey, Colin B., et al. Renoir's Portraits (exh. cat.). New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997, 1-51, 230-231.