Madame Georges Charpentier
Pierre-Auguste Renoir , around 1876/1877
46 × 38 cm
oil on canvas
Musée d'Orsay Paris
Madame Georges Charpentier is a portrait painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir from around 1876/1877 . The picture, 64 cm high and 38 cm wide, painted in oil on canvas in the style of Impressionism shows the Salonnière Marguerite Charpentier , the wife of the publisher Georges Charpentier . The painting belongs to the collection of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris .
Image description
The portrait, held as a shoulder piece, shows Madame Charpentier, who is around 28 years old, against an undefined background. The head, moved slightly to the left from the center of the picture, is painted in quarter profile so that only her right ear can be seen. Your gaze goes over your left shoulder to an unknown point on the right outside of the picture. Renoir painted the face with a pink complexion and the closed lips were clearly set off from the complexion with a red color. A slightly greenish shimmer can be seen in the dark eyes. Her dark blonde hair is parted in the middle, with individual curls falling over her forehead. There is a gold pendant on the right ear, uncovered by the hair. A counterpart to this can be seen above the left shoulder without showing the corresponding ear. Madame Charpentier wears a black dress, of which only the right shoulder area and the left shoulder up to the upper arm cut off from the lower edge of the picture can be seen. The dress has a large, rectangular cleavage that - recognizable on the left breast - is decorated with black lace . Above this lace work there is a white bow on the dress as an accessory . Under the dress, the sitter wears a white - almost transparent - blouse. The blouse covers almost the entire décolleté and only leaves a small opening at the neck, where the blouse fabric changes to a stand-up collar. A decorative rose is attached to the lower edge in the middle of the cleavage.
While the face of Madame Charpentier in particular is worked out in an almost academic manner with fine brushstrokes, the background shows coarse strokes of color that make it impossible to determine a location. The back of a chair can only be guessed at above the shoulder through horizontal brushstrokes. The colors of the background, which run into one another, show dark areas, yellow, blue, green and ocher tones and clearly show the artist's impressionistic painting style. A portrait situation in a garden is conceivable, whereby the background could be trees or other vegetation. An interior space is also conceivable in which Madame Charpentier is depicted in front of a tapestry, curtain, screen or wallpaper. In the upper right corner the painter has signed the picture with “Renoir”.
Background to the creation of the painting
Marguerite Charpentier was the wife of the publisher Georges Charpentier. The salutation Madame Georges Charpentier was common at the time the painting was created and gave the painting its title. The Charpentiers first acquired a painting by Renoir in 1875, whom they met personally a little later. This encounter was extremely important for Renoir, who was in financial distress. The Charpentiers supported the painter with money and commissioned several pictures from him. In addition to the portrait of Madame Georges Charpentier , he created several portraits of the children and finally in 1878 the well-known group portrait of Madame Charpentier and her children ( Metropolitan Museum of Art ), for which Renoir earned much praise. The portrait of Madame Georges Charpentier can be seen as a preliminary work for the later group picture.
Madame Charpentier ran a literary salon in which Renoir found not only writers and other painters but also other clients for his pictures. The painting Madame Georges Charpentier was probably commissioned by her husband. It is possible that Renoir chose the fine elaboration of the facial features - and thereby renounced a freer painting style - in order to win over his clients and patrons. In the 1870s he described himself as the “private painter” of the Charpentiers.
Provenance
After completion, the painting found its place in the drawing room of the Charpentiers. They loaned the picture in 1877 for the third group exhibition of the Impressionists, where, like all pictures in this group, it met with little approval. This changed over the next few decades. During the world exhibition in Paris in 1900, the picture was shown in the overview exhibition Exposition centennale rétrospective de l'Art français de 1800 à 1889 as part of the official program. After the death of Madame Charpentier in 1904 and her husband in 1905, the two daughters Georgette Tournon and Jeanne Dutar inherited their parents' art collection. While most of the pieces were auctioned off in 1907, they first tried to donate the mother's picture to the Louvre . Since its regulations stipulated that no works by living artists should be included - Renoir did not die until 1919 - they initially kept the painting. The picture came into the possession of the French state in 1919 as a gift from the Société des Amis du Luxembourg (Society of Friends of the Musée Luxembourg) with the participation of Georgette Tournon, which initially left it to the Musée du Luxembourg , where it was exhibited until 1929. It was then on display in the Louvre until 1947 and was then in the Jeu de Paume . It has been in the permanent exhibition of the Musée d'Orsay since 1986.
literature
- Anne Distel: Impressionism: the first collectors . Abrams, New York 1990, ISBN 0-8109-3160-5 .
- Melissa McQuillan: Portrait Painting of the French Impressionists . German edition. Rosenheimer Verlagshaus, Rosenheim 1986, ISBN 3-475-52508-9 .