Marguerite Charpentier

Pierre-Auguste Renoir:
Madame Georges Charpentier , 1876–1877, Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Marguerite Louise Charpentier (born March 1, 1848 as Marguerite Louise Lemonnier in Paris ; † November 30, 1904 there ) was a French art collector and salonnière . Together with her husband, the publisher Georges Charpentier , she was one of the earliest patrons of impressionist painters, particularly Pierre-Auguste Renoir . In her salon she received well-known politicians, writers and artists.

Life

Marguerite Lemonnier was born in Paris in 1848 as the daughter of the court jeweler Alexandre-Gabriel Lemonnier and his wife Sophie Raymonde, née Duchâtenet. The younger sister Isabelle was born in 1857. The father ran a jewelry store on the Place Vendôme , where the family temporarily lived. On October 24, 1871, Marguerite Lemonnier married the publisher Georges Charpentier at the Lemonnier family home in Gometz-le-Châtel . One of the best witnesses was Théophile Gautier , one of the authors of the Charpentier publishing house. Marguerite Charpentier lived with her husband in a house at 28 Quai du Louvre before they moved to 11 rue de Grenelle in 1875. There are four children from the marriage. After the daughter Georgette, born in 1872, the son Marcel Gustave followed in 1874, who however died as a child in 1876. In 1875 the son Paul, whose godfather was Émile Zola, was born and in 1880 the daughter Jeanne was born as the last child.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir:
Madame Charpentier and Her Children , 1878,
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

In the house at 11 rue de Grenelle, Marguerite Charpentier ran a political and literary salon - especially from 1875 to the early 1890s - and invited writers, artists and politicians to the house on Fridays. The writer Edmond de Goncourt mentions in his diary that people met in the Charpentiers' drawing room who respected and valued one another, but still expressed their own point of view. In addition to de Goncourt, numerous writers met here, most of whom were looked after by her husband's publishing house. These included Gustave Flaubert , Alphonse Daudet , Guy de Maupassant , Théodore de Banville , Joris-Karl Huysmans and Émile Zola. There were also left-wing politicians such as Léon Gambetta , Jules Grévy , Charles Floquet , Henri Rochefort and Georges Clemenceau, and nobles such as the Countess de Rohan , the Countess d'Uzès and Robert de Montesquiou . In addition, Madame Charpentier invited numerous painters to her salon. Among them was the academic painter Jean-Jacques Henner as well as the realistic painter Émile Auguste Carolus-Duran . In addition to the Italian Giuseppe de Nittis , the painters of French impressionism were the guests of the Charpentiers. This is where Édouard Manet , Claude Monet , Edgar Degas , Pierre-Auguste Renoir , Alfred Sisley and Gustave Caillebotte met . In addition, the art critic Théodore Duret and the art collectors Charles Ephrussi , Charles Deudon , Paul Bérard and Ernest Hoschedé came to visit. Other guests were the composers Emmanuel Chabrier , Camille Saint-Saëns and Jules Massenet . There were also well-known names from the stage, such as the vaudeville artists Yvette Guilbert and Aristide Bruant or the actors Jean Mounet-Sully , Coquelin Cadet and Jeanne Samary, portrayed several times by Renoir . Sarah Bernhardt occasionally gave samples from her repertoire and the Spanish musician Lorenzo Pagans played the guitar.

On the walls of the Charpentiers' salon hung the small but important art collection with paintings predominantly by the painters of French impressionism. Usually it is not exactly clear whether Marguerite Charpentier, her husband or both made the decision to purchase a painting together. There is evidence that Marguerite Charpentier acquired the river landscape Les Glacons from Claude Monet (now the Shelburne Museum ) in 1880 . She is one of the earliest art collectors , along with the American Louisine W. Havemeyer , to acquire Impressionist works. The first impressionist pictures in the Charpentier Collection were works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. In 1875, along with two other paintings by the artist, the painting Le Pêcheur à la ligne (private collection) was added to the collection for 180 francs. Renoir, who, like Monet and Sisley, was financially supported by the Charpentiers, received several portrait commissions from the collector couple and described himself as the Charpentiers' “private painter”.

So in 1876, Homme sur un escalier and Femme sur un esaclier (both Hermitage (Saint Petersburg) ), two decorative pieces for the stairwell at 11 rue de Grenelle, probably depicting the Charpentiers. This was followed in 1876 by the painting Georgette Charpentier sitting ( Artizon Museum ) and the portrait of Madame Georges Charpentier ( Musée d'Orsay ), and in 1877 by the portrait of his son Paul Charpentier (private collection). These pictures can be seen as preparatory work for the large-format family portrait of Madame Charpentier and her children ( Metropolitan Museum of Art ) from 1878. The picture was exhibited the following year at the Paris Salon , where Renoir received great recognition for the picture. Marcel Proust refers to this painting in Le Temps Retrouvé ( Time Rediscovered ) and praises the portrayal of "the poetic of a noble house and beautiful clothes in our time".

The other pictures in the Charpentier Collection included the naval picture Naval Battle between the Kearsage and the Alabama by Édouard Manet, acquired in 1878 for 700 francs . Like his painter friends, the artist regularly visited the Charpentiers' salon, but in contrast to them, he had inherited fortunes. It is therefore possible that the acquisition of a picture by Manet was an exception. In the Charpentiers' salon, Manet met his younger sister Isabelle Charpentier, who was one of his favorite models in the last years of his life and to whom he wrote several letters, some of them tender. Another painter of whom there was only one picture in the Charpentier collection was Paul Cézanne . It is possible that Émile Zola had made contact with Cézanne. Probably not really convinced by Cézanne's painting style, the Charpentiers acquired the small oil sketch Marion and Valabrègue ( Museo Soumaya ).

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  Pierre-Auguste Renoir:
  Le Pêcheur à la ligne

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  Pierre-Auguste Renoir:
  Georgette Charpentier seated

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  Pierre-Auguste Renoir:
  Paul Charpentier

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  Édouard Manet:
  Naval battle between the Kearsage and the Alabama

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  Claude Monet:
  Les Glacons

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  Paul Cézanne:
  Marion and Valabrègue

Possibly on the advice of Marguerite Charpentier, her husband founded the weekly journal La Vie moderne in 1879 , which dealt with topics from artistic, literary and social life. A room for exhibitions was connected to the editorial rooms. Renoir and Monet's first solo exhibitions took place here, but de Nittis and Manet also showed their latest pictures here. At the beginning of the 1880s, the Charpentiers publishing house ran into financial difficulties and the publishers were forced to part with their land and part of their art collection. Only a few years later did the publishing house recover thanks to Zola's literary success. In his honor they named their new holiday villa near Royan Le Paradou - after a fictional estate in Zola's novel La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret . Here, too, Madame Charpentier acted as host and welcomed Zola as well as Théodore Duret and Sarah Bernhardt to her house.

In Paris, the Charpentiers last lived in a house on avenue Victor-Hugo . In 1895, their son Paul died of typhus while serving in the military at the age of 20 . In the last years of her life, Marguerite Charpentier devoted herself to the La Pouponnière house, which she founded in Porchefontaine (district of Versailles ), an institution for single mothers. Madame Charpentier died in Paris in 1904, her husband died the following year. In 1907 the two surviving children, daughters Georgette and Jeanne, had their parents' art collection auctioned. In 1919 the daughter Georgette - now Madame Tournon - together with the Société des Amis du Luxembourg (Society of Friends of the Musée Luxembourg) donated Renoir's portrait of the mother to the French state, which shows it first in the Musée du Luxembourg and today in the Musée d'Orsay.

literature

• Anne Distel: Impressionism: the first collectors . Abrams, New York 1990, ISBN 0-8109-3160-5 .
• Edmond de Goncourt: Journal des Goncourt . Volume 5, 1872–1877, Bibliothèque-Charpentier, Paris 1891.
• Albert Kostenewitsch: From the Hermitage: lost masterpieces in German private collections. Kindler, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-463-40278-5 .
• Melissa McQuillan: Portrait Painting of the French Impressionists . Rosenheimer Verlagshaus, Rosenheim 1986, ISBN 3-475-52508-9 .
• Marcel Proust: Le Temps Retrouvé . Gallimard, Paris 1927.
• Michel Robida: Le Salon Charpentier et les impressionistes . Bibliothèque des arts, Paris 1958.

Individual evidence

1. ^ “Que le salon Charpentier aura peut-être la fortune - chose regardée comme impossible en France - de réunir et de mettre en contact des gens d'opinion différente, qui s'estiment et s'apprécient, chacun, bien entendu, gardant son opinion. ”Diary entry of January 19, 1877. In Edmond de Goncourt: Journal des Goncourt . Volume 5, p. 310.
2. ^ Louisine W. Havemeyer bought her first pictures from Monet and Degas in 1877. Much later, from 1889, Bertha Honoré Palmer , for example, acquired works of impressionism. See Anne Distel: Impressionism: the first collectors. P. 243.
3. ↑ Albert Kostenewitsch: From the Hermitage: German Lost Masterpieces private collections. P. 92.
4. ↑ Albert Kostenewitsch: From the Hermitage: German Lost Masterpieces private collections. P. 89.
5. ↑ German quote from Melissa McQuillan: Portrait painting of the French Impressionists. P. 136. Original quote “La poésie d'un élégant foyer et des belles toilettes de notre temps ne se trouvera-t-elle pas plutôt, pour la postérité, dans le salon de l'éditeur Charpentier par Renoir que dans le portrait de la princesse de Sagan ou de la comtesse de la Rochefoucauld par Cotte ou Chaplin? ”in Marcel Proust: Le Temps Retrouvé. P. 42.
6. ↑ Melissa McQuillan: Portrait painting of the French impressionists. P. 146.
7. ↑ On Villa Le Paradou see Emile Zola, écrivain on the website www.c-royan.com /