The Many Faces of Lise Tréhot Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Portraits of Parisiennes
john house
We know very little about Pierre-August Renoir’s liaison with Lise Tréhot, the first important emotional relationship he engaged in, apart from that with his parents, for which we have any evidence whatsoever. The affair with Lise left a strong mark on the early part of Renoir’s artistic career, and recent research by Marc Le Coeur and Jean-Claude Gélineau has opened up new sources of information about Lise’s life and, to some extent, about their association.1 Interestingly, the sources of the information that we had previously about Renoir’s pictures of Lise were derived, indirectly, from two paintings in the Wendy and Emery Reves Collection at the Dallas Museum of Art. When they were acquired by Emery Reves, he sought out Lise’s surviving relatives, who sent him the family version of her life story. Reves passed along this information to Douglas Cooper, who published it in articles that we scholars had all assumed, until about five years ago, to be entirely correct.2 As it turns out, the information given by the Tréhot family to Reves and Cooper was a pack of lies. So, we are left with a number of rather radical reconfigurations of what actually happened between the people you will be meeting as we go along, but I want to say at the start that the key question is not what Renoir and Lise got up to (though we will see evidence of that) but rather how Lise is represented in Renoir’s art and the roles that Renoir invites this particular model to take on. In the paintings by Renoir that we now think represent Lise, even her facial features do not appear to remain consistent: Renoir’s brush shows her as a very malleable model. The idea of the model — posing and playing, enacting various roles — is particularly important here because we see Lise in so many guises. This variety is of great interest in a broad consideration about the social position of the young Parisian woman in France at the end of the 1860s and in the early 1870s. social status and the artist ’s model As far as we know, Renoir and Lise met around 1866, and Lise Sewing (figs. 11 and 12) probably dates to fairly soon after that, though I think it’s not the very earliest picture of Lise. It is possibly from around 1867 or 1868. Lise in a White Shawl (fig. 13) has always been believed to be the last of his paintings of her, dating to 1872. It may be one of the last, but perhaps not absolutely the last. Nonetheless, the two pictures span essentially the life of their relationship, and as they
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opposite figure 11 Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Lise Sewing, c. 1867–68 Detail of figure 12