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拍品专文
This work will be included in the forthcoming Pierre-Auguste Renoir Digital Catalogue Raisonné, currently being prepared under the sponsorship of the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, Inc.
“What we need are the special characteristics of the modern individual––in his clothing, in social situations, at home, or on the street,” wrote the critic Edmond Duranty in La nouvelle peinture of 1876, a staunch defense of the foremost Impressionist goal of capturing the look and feel of contemporary life in rapidly modernizing Paris (quoted in Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity, exh. cat., Art Institute of Chicago, 2013, p. 17). For Renoir, born of modest means to a tailor and a dressmaker, costume constituted the single most alluring element of this modern urban spectacle. The core of his work from the 1870s is the depiction of young Parisians dressed in the latest fashions––at the theater, the dance-hall, the café, or the milliner’s shop, or caught up in the crowds on the street.
This fascination with millinery is well depicted in La Place Clichy (fig. 1) in the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum, of which the present work is one of several studies Renoir painted in 1880. In this work, Renoir focuses in on the man and woman in the center background of the Fitzwilliam painting, reversing their positions to allow for a better view of the rosy-cheeked woman. Renoir further blurs the additional figures in the background, appearing ghost-like in the upper left. His use of bright blues and pinks to depict the woman’s face and hat brim provide a stark contrast with the surrounding palette, as though a ray of sunshine was directed right over her. Renoir’s choice to obstruct the view of the woman in the larger canvas was perhaps motivated by a decision not to detract from the focal point of the painting, the feathered chapeau in the foreground. Despite the different configuration of people, each canvas displays a compositional perspective that demonstrates Renoir’s awareness of the most recent discoveries in photography and how those perspectives could be used to imbue his works with a sense of modernity and immediacy.
“What we need are the special characteristics of the modern individual––in his clothing, in social situations, at home, or on the street,” wrote the critic Edmond Duranty in La nouvelle peinture of 1876, a staunch defense of the foremost Impressionist goal of capturing the look and feel of contemporary life in rapidly modernizing Paris (quoted in Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity, exh. cat., Art Institute of Chicago, 2013, p. 17). For Renoir, born of modest means to a tailor and a dressmaker, costume constituted the single most alluring element of this modern urban spectacle. The core of his work from the 1870s is the depiction of young Parisians dressed in the latest fashions––at the theater, the dance-hall, the café, or the milliner’s shop, or caught up in the crowds on the street.
This fascination with millinery is well depicted in La Place Clichy (fig. 1) in the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum, of which the present work is one of several studies Renoir painted in 1880. In this work, Renoir focuses in on the man and woman in the center background of the Fitzwilliam painting, reversing their positions to allow for a better view of the rosy-cheeked woman. Renoir further blurs the additional figures in the background, appearing ghost-like in the upper left. His use of bright blues and pinks to depict the woman’s face and hat brim provide a stark contrast with the surrounding palette, as though a ray of sunshine was directed right over her. Renoir’s choice to obstruct the view of the woman in the larger canvas was perhaps motivated by a decision not to detract from the focal point of the painting, the feathered chapeau in the foreground. Despite the different configuration of people, each canvas displays a compositional perspective that demonstrates Renoir’s awareness of the most recent discoveries in photography and how those perspectives could be used to imbue his works with a sense of modernity and immediacy.