ALINE AND PIERRE IN A GARDEN - by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, ca. 1885

by Jacques Farran, Auctioneer

From a "fleeting sensation" to a feeling of lasting happiness

The greatest artists know how to reinvent themselves. A master of the Impressionist movement, Renoir was no longer satisfied with his painting in the 1880s and looked for a new path.
In the same way as mid-18th century painters, architects and sculptors had gone to Italy to discover the antique world, Renoir undertook extensive travels between 1881 and 1883. Penniless, scathed by art critics, he longed for a more serious and official way of painting. Looking to break out of the predicament of modernity, he first visited Paul Cézanne in L’Estaque (a village south of Marseilles). Cézanne was already disengaging himself from the Impressionist movement at the time, playing with volumes and "painting like Poussin in natural surroundings". Then, similarly to the Orientalists, Renoir set out to discover North Africa.


But it was in Italy during the winter of 1881-1882 that Renoir had an epiphany about a new painting style. Struck by Raphael’s work, especially by the frescoes he painted in the Vatican - in the so-called “Raphael’s Rooms” - he began to draw the outlines of figures coupled with acid colors. This "sour style" or "Renoir’s Ingres period" as it was called, due to the similarities between his work and that of the “French Raphael”, is condensed in one masterpiece: The Great Bathers (1884-1887, Philadelphia).

A milestone in the artist's career, it also bears witness to an intimate transformation. Renoir painted that same young blond woman before: she’s the one playing with a dog in his Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880-1881, Washington D.C, The Phillips Collection). Named Aline Charigot (1859-1915), she was Renoir’s model before becoming his lover, then his wife - they wed in 1890. Auguste took her along on his trip to Italy, the artist’s pictographic revolution therefore going hand in hand with his discovery of lasting love. Aline gave him three children, Pierre (1885-1952), Jean (1894-1979) and Claude (1913-1993). When Pierre was born, Renoir stopped everything he was working on to start and paint motherhood scenes. After Aline’s death in 1915, he revisited that same theme, only this time in sculpture, with the help of Guino.


Our painting depicts a curvy woman akin to another portrait of Aline (1885, Philadelphia). Blond and sweet, Renoir painted her in cross-hatched strokes reminiscent of Cézanne's 1880s work. Two other studies from the same year, presented in the critical catalogue of Renoir’s works (1022 A and 1022 B, p. 214, Guy-Patrice & Dauberville) also depict Aline's motherhood. Our painting, both of these studies, and the portrait of Aline housed in Philadelphia all show the importance of the painter’s loved one in his work and life. The red and blue silhouettes of our painting jump from the green background. Renoir does not emphasize the distinctiveness of his models but the moment’s sweetness. Rather than focusing on his models’ facial features, the artist worked on the nuances of the botanical background. With his motif’s outline, Renoir seems to draw a mysterious hyphen between Ingres and Cézanne…