11
PIER R E- AUGUSTE R EN O IR Limoges 1841 – 1919 Cagnes
Petite baigneuse
This jewel-like painting, made circa 1876 at the height of his Impressionist phase, is an example of Renoir’s liking for very small formats, which gives the work the intensity of a miniature without sacrificing freedom of brushwork and acute observation of colour, light and nature. He did, after all, begin his career working on a small scale, as an apprentice to a porcelain painter. There is extraordinary life and immediacy within the small format of the Petite baigneuse. Renoir describes the multicoloured shadows on the model’s skin as she sits in dappled sunlight under a tree. He blends the filaments of colour with a dreamlike sensuality, evoking heat, languor and the long tradition of the European nude in which his art is steeped. Renoir was particularly interested in painting figures in the dappled sunlight of woods and parks in this period, for example in The swing, 1876 and Ball at the Moulin de la Galette, 1876 (both Musée d’Orsay, Paris). In Petite baigneuse, the pink and gold highlights of the model’s skin are set against the deep green and blue shadows of the trees, but there is a blurring of the boundaries between human and landscape, so that the young woman seems truly a wood nymph. Petite baigneuse is related to a larger painting of circa 1875–6, Etude.Torse de femme au soleil (Musée d’Orsay, Paris), which Renoir showed at the second Impressionist group exhibition in 1876.1 It shares with Petite baigneuse the same intensity of blue-green shadows and rosy flesh and the almost abstract treatment of the background. Vollard and Jamot identify the model as Anna, whose full name was Alma Henriette Leboeuf (1856–1879). In a letter to Dr Gachet, physician to and patron of several of the Impressionists, Renoir urges the doctor to visit Anna. Sadly, she died on 18th February 1879, aged twenty-three. The Leboeuf family owned paintings by Renoir until the 1930s. Petite baigneuse was from 1954 in the collection of the inventor and entrepreneur Alexander Lewyt (1908–1988) and his wife Elizabeth. Mr Lewyt invented the vacuum cleaner which bore his name and the Lewyt Corporation made items for the Allies, including radar scanners, in the Second World War. The Lewyts built up a superb collection of works by Degas, Cézanne, Gauguin, Bonnard, Renoir and others, many of which they donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
1 Oil on canvas 32 × 25 ½ in / 81 × 65 cm. Boston/Paris/London, Renoir, op. cit., pp.208–9, illus.; illus. in colour p.75.
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THE SPIRIT OF IMPRESSIONISM
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Etude. Torse de femme au soleil, c.1875–76. Oil on canvas. Musée d’Orsay, Paris / Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library.