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Lot Essay
Painted circa 1890, Portrait de fillette sur fond bleu is a delicate, radiant work by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, created at the height of his mastery of the portraiture genre. Renoir’s sitter, who has been identified by his heirs as Julie Manet, the daughter of Berthe Morisot and Eugène Manet, brother to Édouard Manet, is striking. Set against a blue ground, she is shown seated in a simple wood chair. Her face is framed by long, flowing locks, and a single curl falls across one eye. Renoir has used a variety of brushstrokes, from the barely visible marks that make up her face and chair to the looser, more feathery rendering of the white dress, which is accented with daubs of blue and lavender. Indeed, Portrait de fillette sur fond bleu signals the beginning of a new moment in Renoir’s practice, during which he abandoned the more precise outlines that had characterised his ‘Ingresque’ period and instead embraced gentler brushwork. While the composition of the painting – a seated figure – may seem conventional, Renoir’s nuanced application of paint and reliance on natural light make Portrait de fillette sur fond bleu radical for its era.
Renoir likely painted Portrait de fillette sur fond bleu following a lengthy stay at the Manets’ home in Mézy-sur-Seine. In search of fresh country air, Morisot and her husband had rented a home in the small village northwest of Paris during the summer of 1890, and they invited Renoir to visit them there. He would return again with his wife Aline the following year. While there, Renoir asked Julie and her cousin Jeanne Gobillard to pose for him, and, in addition to the present work, he made several images of the duo including In the Meadow, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Girls Picking Flowers in a Meadow, held in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Renoir and Morisot were very fond of one another, and he would later reflect that their friendship was ‘one of the most solid of his life’ (C. Bailey, Renoir’s Portraits: Impressions of an Age, New Haven, 1997, p. 220). Their earliest correspondence dates from 1877, when, along with Gustave Caillebotte, Renoir invited Morisot to participate in the Third Impressionist Exhibition. It was not until 1886, however, that their bond was truly cemented: that year, Morisot began visiting Renoir at his studio, and he, in turn, attended her widely popular salons, held every Thursday at her home at 40 rue de Villejust in Paris. Over the years, the artists and their families became friendly, and Renoir painted several portraits of Julie. She grew even closer to the Renoirs following the death of first her father in 1892 and then her mother in 1895, and spent the summer recovering with the family. In a diary entry from 4 October 1895, she wrote, ‘Monsieur Renoir has been so kind and so charming all summer; the more one sees of him, the more one realises he is a true artist, first class and extraordinarily intelligent, but also with a genuine simple heartedness’ (quoted in M. Mathieu, ed., Julie Manet: An Impressionist Heritage, exh. cat., Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris, 2021, p. 167).
As a working portrait artist, Renoir was often commissioned to paint the children of his patrons, but the subject matter also aligned with his own artistic aims. Cautious about industrialisation and the changes that it wrought, Renoir seemed to uncover in his paintings an ‘original innocence’ (M. Lucy, ‘Children’, in M. Lucy and J. House, Renoir in the Barnes Foundation, London, 2012, p. 239). So often, his works embody a sense of guilelessness and a nostalgia for simpler times, and it was partly for this reason that the paintings of children were beloved by critics and clients alike. Even more significantly, however, was the manner in which these portraits were imbued with a such commanding sense of presence. Far from meek and passive, his youthful sitters are wholly alive, which Renoir achieved by eschewing pretence. As Edmond Renoir observed of the artist’s methods, ‘When he paints a portrait he asks his model to behave normally, to sit as she usually sits, to dress as she usually dresses, so that nothing smacks of constraint or artificial preparation’ (C. Bailey, ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Portrait Painter’, in C. Bailey, op. cit., 1997, p. 20). This is underscored in Portrait de fillette sur fond bleu: although quietly composed, this young girl is nevertheless formidable.
Renoir likely painted Portrait de fillette sur fond bleu following a lengthy stay at the Manets’ home in Mézy-sur-Seine. In search of fresh country air, Morisot and her husband had rented a home in the small village northwest of Paris during the summer of 1890, and they invited Renoir to visit them there. He would return again with his wife Aline the following year. While there, Renoir asked Julie and her cousin Jeanne Gobillard to pose for him, and, in addition to the present work, he made several images of the duo including In the Meadow, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Girls Picking Flowers in a Meadow, held in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Renoir and Morisot were very fond of one another, and he would later reflect that their friendship was ‘one of the most solid of his life’ (C. Bailey, Renoir’s Portraits: Impressions of an Age, New Haven, 1997, p. 220). Their earliest correspondence dates from 1877, when, along with Gustave Caillebotte, Renoir invited Morisot to participate in the Third Impressionist Exhibition. It was not until 1886, however, that their bond was truly cemented: that year, Morisot began visiting Renoir at his studio, and he, in turn, attended her widely popular salons, held every Thursday at her home at 40 rue de Villejust in Paris. Over the years, the artists and their families became friendly, and Renoir painted several portraits of Julie. She grew even closer to the Renoirs following the death of first her father in 1892 and then her mother in 1895, and spent the summer recovering with the family. In a diary entry from 4 October 1895, she wrote, ‘Monsieur Renoir has been so kind and so charming all summer; the more one sees of him, the more one realises he is a true artist, first class and extraordinarily intelligent, but also with a genuine simple heartedness’ (quoted in M. Mathieu, ed., Julie Manet: An Impressionist Heritage, exh. cat., Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris, 2021, p. 167).
As a working portrait artist, Renoir was often commissioned to paint the children of his patrons, but the subject matter also aligned with his own artistic aims. Cautious about industrialisation and the changes that it wrought, Renoir seemed to uncover in his paintings an ‘original innocence’ (M. Lucy, ‘Children’, in M. Lucy and J. House, Renoir in the Barnes Foundation, London, 2012, p. 239). So often, his works embody a sense of guilelessness and a nostalgia for simpler times, and it was partly for this reason that the paintings of children were beloved by critics and clients alike. Even more significantly, however, was the manner in which these portraits were imbued with a such commanding sense of presence. Far from meek and passive, his youthful sitters are wholly alive, which Renoir achieved by eschewing pretence. As Edmond Renoir observed of the artist’s methods, ‘When he paints a portrait he asks his model to behave normally, to sit as she usually sits, to dress as she usually dresses, so that nothing smacks of constraint or artificial preparation’ (C. Bailey, ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Portrait Painter’, in C. Bailey, op. cit., 1997, p. 20). This is underscored in Portrait de fillette sur fond bleu: although quietly composed, this young girl is nevertheless formidable.