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Lot Essay
This painting will be included in the forthcoming Renoir catalogue critique being prepared by the Wildenstein Institute and established from the archive funds of François Daulte, Durand-Ruel, Venturi, Vollard and Wildenstein.
In the last years of the 19th Century Galerie Bernheim-Jeune opened a lavish new premises on Avenue de l'Opéra in Paris - as the most opulent viewing space in the city it quickly attracted a generation of collectors who would fuel the later commercial success of the Impressionists. Among the most successful of the group at this point was Renoir, whose période ingresque had caught the eye of Paul Gallimard, the owner of the Théâtre des Variétés in Paris. Gallimard's patronage of Renoir lasted for many years, with the theatre owner commissioning Renoir to paint his wife in the famous 1892 Portrait de Madame Paul Gallimard. One such commission was to be a series of oil paintings depicting the classical story of Oedipus and Jocasta, for Gallimard's residence in Normandy. In the end the patronnever acquired the finished paintings and they therefore remained in the artist's studio, together with several related studies such as the present lot. In this work we see the protagonists of Sophocles' tragedy, composed in landscape format, echoing the stage set of a play. This dramatic subject was a departure for Renoir, who usually favoured bucolic landscapes and of course the portraiture of women which he was so famous for. However, as evidenced in this work, he approaches the subject with the same pale hues and impressionistic brushstrokes as he would a Provençal landscape or the blushing faces of his nudes. This work stands as a vignette of a great partnership between patron and artist, and of a project that sadly never saw its own fruition.
In the last years of the 19th Century Galerie Bernheim-Jeune opened a lavish new premises on Avenue de l'Opéra in Paris - as the most opulent viewing space in the city it quickly attracted a generation of collectors who would fuel the later commercial success of the Impressionists. Among the most successful of the group at this point was Renoir, whose période ingresque had caught the eye of Paul Gallimard, the owner of the Théâtre des Variétés in Paris. Gallimard's patronage of Renoir lasted for many years, with the theatre owner commissioning Renoir to paint his wife in the famous 1892 Portrait de Madame Paul Gallimard. One such commission was to be a series of oil paintings depicting the classical story of Oedipus and Jocasta, for Gallimard's residence in Normandy. In the end the patronnever acquired the finished paintings and they therefore remained in the artist's studio, together with several related studies such as the present lot. In this work we see the protagonists of Sophocles' tragedy, composed in landscape format, echoing the stage set of a play. This dramatic subject was a departure for Renoir, who usually favoured bucolic landscapes and of course the portraiture of women which he was so famous for. However, as evidenced in this work, he approaches the subject with the same pale hues and impressionistic brushstrokes as he would a Provençal landscape or the blushing faces of his nudes. This work stands as a vignette of a great partnership between patron and artist, and of a project that sadly never saw its own fruition.