figure 12 Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Lise Sewing, c. 1867–68 Dallas Museum of Art figure 13 Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Lise in a White Shawl, c. 1872 Dallas Museum of Art
were the only pictures by Renoir that Lise seems to have kept throughout her life, they clearly held a significance for her, but not, I will suggest, quite the significance that people have thought. I would like to point out right at the beginning that in each of these paintings, Lise plays a role. In Lise Sewing, she is wearing a wedding ring (though she and Renoir were certainly not married), and she is sewing with an infinitely delicately painted needle. In the later portrait, Lise is rather mysterious, wearing dark clothing and a seemingly Spanish shawl and a sort of bright red cravat and looking past us. Here the role she is playing is both exotic and, I think, not absolutely explicit.
Lise Tréhot (fig. 14) was born in March 1848, and thus when she and Renoir were definitely together, by the summer of 1866, she was eighteen years old. Renoir was twenty-five. He most likely met her through his close friend Jules Le Coeur, an amateur painter and a more serious architect, who was a little bit older than Renoir. Le Coeur was also the lover of Lise’s older sister Clemence, so they were tied by a close family link (fig. 15). In Lise in a Straw Hat, probably the first of Renoir’s paintings of Lise (fig. 16), she is placed by a river, and we are given just enough evidence to know that this setting is not rural but rather suburban. The suburban river was an important setting for paintings in the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s in France, and there is also a lot of writing during those years about boating and the activities on the riverbank. One contemporary observer, for instance, was careful to distinguish, on the one hand, the serious canotiers (boaters), who rowed for prizes, and, on the other hand, those who were on the river purely for pleasure. The latter rowed energetically, but “only in order to reach more quickly a quiet spot where the wine is cool, . . . the trees are green, and the bathing women can find a sandy bottom in the river and some shade. . . . These canotiers are accompanied by canotières — nimble, spruce, laughing, tireless young women who are never worried about the morrow, provided one takes them out for an excursion, feeds them well, and appears to find them pretty.”3 Lise in a Straw Hat is a relatively small picture, genre painting–sized and domestically scaled. It was not intended as a major exhibition picture, but rather made for sale on the commercial market. But, throughout the late 1860s and early 1870s, Renoir was also painting a sequence of large works intended for exhibition at the Paris Salon and almost exclusively devoted to Lise. It should be stressed that these were works designed by Renoir for public display, and they must be seen as major public statements by a young artist. The first of these, unfortunately, is a complete frustration: it is a painting we know that Renoir submitted to the Salon of 1866, but it was rejected by
figure 14 Photograph of Lise Tréhot in 1864 Private collection
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figure 15 Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Jules Le Coeur and Clemence Tréhot, 1867 Dallas Museum of Art figure 16 Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Lise in a Straw Hat, c. 1866 The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia