"I have taken up again, never to abandon it, my old style, soft and light of touch," Renoir announced to his dealer Durand-Ruel in 1888. This picture, made the following year, exemplifies the artist’s predilection for equally gentle and lyrical subjects. Daises and other wildflowers lend a note of rustic charm to the sweet-faced model. Such celebrations of youth and beauty proved to be highly successful with Renoir’s clientele.
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Credit Line:The Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ittleson Jr. Purchase Fund, 1959
Object Number:59.21
The Painting: Renoir loved young, blond, rosy women, whom he joyfully painted with and without their clothes until the last year of his life. He had also learned by the late 1880s that colorfully pigmented canvases of this size or smaller showing single female figures did well in the art market. Presumably, the girl here should be read as a generic type: a young person from the country of gentle, modest demeanor. She has fair skin and wears her auburn hair in a thick braid tied with a pink ribbon. Above a tightly cinched dark bodice, the chemise that falls from her shoulders reveals large breasts seen from above. Renoir contrasts the girl’s skin with the fabric, which is modeled in white and blue. Her hands rest in her lap as she fingers wildflowers—daisies, a poppy, and perhaps morning glories. The technique for the figure and even more so for the landscape is evanescent, blended and without hard contour lines, so that the shades of color fade gradually into one another. In addition to the many long, sweeping strokes that describe her there are also passages with denser impasto to highlight her forehead, nose, cheek, and breasts. The flowers are delicately painted over her left arm. Leaving aside a suggestion of the trunks and crowns of two trees, the background, which is thin, is illegible and imaginary.
The Style: This undated picture is assigned by Daulte in the first volume of the Renoir catalogue raisonné to the year 1889. The girl’s three-quarter-length seated pose is a traditional one that was used for centuries for portrait sitters, and she is nobly proportioned, reminiscent perhaps of Raphael, whose work Renoir admired more than any other painter of the Renaissance. As a result of his trip to Italy in 1881–82, the artist had chosen to adopt hard, more linear contours, with the carefully drawn and smoothly modelled figures embedded in a looser, more spontaneous Impressionist background. However, toward the end of the decade he reverted to his earlier manner. When writing in 1888 to his dealer Durand-Ruel, he explained: “I have taken up again, never to abandon it, my old style, soft and light of touch.”[1] He developed and then supplied a market for pretty, graceful figures of individual young women, of which the present canvas is an important and exceptionally sympathetic example.
Provenance: Before it was bought for The Met in 1959, A Young Girl with Daisies effectively changed hands only once. It had previously belonged to two of the most important and knowledgeable art-dealing families in Paris, by whom it seems to have been regarded as a personal possession. Alexandre Rosenberg acquired it directly from the artist shortly after it was painted, and thereafter it was owned by the Bernheim brothers, Josse (d. 1941) and Gaston (d. 1953), and, ultimately, by Gaston’s widow, Madame Suzanne Bernheim de Villers. All of them would have known Renoir. In 1910, Monsieur and Madame Bernheim de Villers sat for Renoir for a double portrait (Musée d’Orsay, Paris, RF 1951 28).
Katharine Baetjer 2021
[1] Quoted in John House, Renoir in the Barnes Foundation (New Haven, 2010), p. 121.
Inscription: Signed (lower right): Renoir.
[Alexandre Rosenberg, Paris; bought from the artist about 1890]; Mme Alexandre Rosenberg, Paris (until 1912; sold to Bernheim-Jeune); Josse Bernheim-Jeune and his brother Gaston Bernheim-Jeune, Paris (from 1912; Gaston d. 1953); the latter's widow, Mme Suzanne Bernheim de Villers, Monte Carlo (until 1959; sold to The Met)
Paris. Durand-Ruel. "Exposition Renoir," March 10–29, 1913, no. 35 (as "La jeune fille aux marguerites," 1889).
Paris. Musée de l'Orangerie. "Exposition Renoir, 1841–1919," 1933, no. 88 (lent by MM. Bernheim-Jeune, Paris).
Glasgow. McLellan Galleries. "French Painting in the XIXth Century," May 1934, no. 38.
London. Alex. Reid & Lefevre, Ltd. "Renoir, Cézanne, and their Contemporaries," June 1934, no. 29.
Paris. Bernheim-Jeune. "Renoir, portraitiste," June 10–July 27, 1938, no. 14 (as "Portrait d'une jeune fille aux marguerites").
New York. Wildenstein. "Renoir: In Commemoration of the Fiftieth Anniversary of Renoir's Death," March 27–May 3, 1969, no. 66 (as "A Young Girl with Daisies").
Bellevue, Wash. Bellevue Art Museum. "Five Thousand Years of Faces," January 30–July 30, 1983, unnumbered cat.
Yokohama Museum of Art. "Treasures from The Metropolitan Museum of Art: French Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century," March 25–June 4, 1989, no. 96.
San Diego Museum of Art. "Idol of the Moderns: Pierre Auguste Renoir and American Painting," June 29–September 15, 2002, no. 4.
El Paso Museum of Art. "Idol of the Moderns: Pierre Auguste Renoir and American Painting," November 3, 2002–February 16, 2003, no. 4.
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. "The Masterpieces of French Painting from The Metropolitan Museum of Art: 1800–1920," February 4–May 6, 2007, no. 102.
Berlin. Neue Nationalgalerie. "Französische Meisterwerke des 19. Jahrhunderts aus dem Metropolitan Museum of Art," June 1–October 7, 2007, unnumbered cat.
Sendai, Japan. Miyagi Museum of Art. "Image of Color: Pierre-Auguste Renoir," January 14–April 16, 2017, no. 29.
Williamstown. Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. "Renoir: The Body, The Senses," June 8–September 22, 2019, no. 36.
Fort Worth. Kimbell Art Museum. "Renoir: The Body, The Senses," October 27, 2019–January 26, 2020, no. 36.
Brisbane. Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art. "European Masterpieces from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York," June 12–October 17, 2021, unnumbered cat.
Osaka. Osaka City Museum of Fine Arts. "European Masterpieces from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York," November 13, 2021–January 16, 2022, no. 57.
Tokyo. National Art Center. "European Masterpieces from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York," February 9–May 30, 2022, no. 57.
Octave Mirbeau, ed. Renoir. Paris, 1913, p. 60, ill. between pp. 34 and 35.
L'art moderne et quelques aspects de l'art d'autrefois; cent-soixante-treize planches d'après la collection privée de MM. J. & G. Bernheim-Jeune. Paris, 1919, vol. 2, pl. 112.
Joris Karl Huysmans. L'art moderne. reprint ed. [first ed. 1883]. Paris, 1919, vol. 2, pl. 112.
Gustave Coquiot. Renoir. Paris, 1925, p. 228, dates it 1889.
Julius Meier-Graefe. Renoir. Leipzig, 1929, p. 149, ill.
Léo Larguier. "Entre mille images, Renoir et le médicin." L'art vivant 60 (July 1933), p. 288, ill.
French Painting in the XIXth Century. Exh. cat., Lefevre Fine Art Ltd. Glasgow, 1934, unpaginated, dates it 1883.
Albert C. Barnes and Violette De Mazia. The Art of Renoir. New York, 1935, pp. 85, 107, 459, no. 179, date it about 1889.
Ole Vinding. Renoir. Stockholm, 1951, unpaginated, ill., dates it between 1889 and 1890.
François Daulte. Letter to Theodore Rousseau. April 4, 1963.
Charles Sterling and Margaretta M. Salinger. French Paintings: A Catalogue of the Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vol. 3, XIX–XX Centuries. New York, 1967, p. 157, ill., notes the likeness of the figure to that in "Place Pigalle" (Coutauld collection, London), which Renoir painted about 1880, but thinks there is a stronger resemblance to "A Girl Reading" (Durand-Ruel, Paris and New York), of 1888–90, both in the figure and in the application of paint.
François Daulte. Auguste Renoir: Catalogue raisonné de l'œuvre peint. Vol. 1, Figures. Lausanne, 1971, unpaginated, no. 565, ill.
"Leihgabenaustausch." Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen Jahresbericht (1976), pp. 12–13.
Thomas Schlotterback inFive Thousand Years of Faces. Exh. cat., Bellevue Art Museum. Bellevue, Wash., 1983, unpaginated.
Margaret I. O'Brien. "L. A. Police Get 'Prince Frank' — $15 Million in Fakes Seized." IFARreports 10, no. 12 (December 1989), p. 4, ill, relates that "Prince Frank" or Frank de Marigny, alias Frank Orval, has been arrested on charges of grand theft because he offered this painting for sale, using a color transparency.
Katharine Baetjer. European Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art by Artists Born Before 1865: A Summary Catalogue. New York, 1995, p. 484, ill.
Susan Alyson Stein inThe Masterpieces of French Painting from The Metropolitan Museum of Art: 1800–1920. Exh. cat., Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. New York, 2007, pp. 140, 253, no. 102, ill. (color and black and white).
Guy-Patrice Dauberville and Michel Dauberville. Renoir: Catalogue raisonné des tableaux, pastels, dessins et aquarelles. Vol. 2, 1882–1894. Paris, 2009, pp. 278–79, no. 1124, ill.
Martha Lucy inRenoir: The Body, the Senses. Ed. Esther Bell and George T. M. Shackelford. Exh. cat., Clark Art Institute. Williamstown, Mass., 2019, p. 103.
Renoir: The Body, the Senses. Ed. Esther Bell and George T. M. Shackelford. Exh. cat., Clark Art Institute. Williamstown, Mass., 2019, p. 237, no. 36, colorpl. 36.
Katharine Baetjer inEuropean Masterpieces from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Exh. cat., Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art. South Brisbane, 2021, pp. 205, 232, ill. pp. 204, 206–7 (color, overall and detail).
Auguste Renoir (French, Limoges 1841–1919 Cagnes-sur-Mer)
1894
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