Lise

Background

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) grew up in Paris. His father worked as a tailor and his mother as a seamstress. Renoir trained as a porcelain painter but the Industrial Revolution replaced porcelain painters with machines. He found work as a decorative commercial artist during the day while learning to draw in the evenings. In the early 1860s, he spent his free time studying paintings at the Louvre and worked in the studio under Charles Gleyre, spending two years at the École des Beaux-Arts. Renoir began submitting his work to the Salon in 1863. His first submission, Nymph and Faun, was rejected, leading Renoir to destroy his painting. The next year, Renoir tried again, submitting La Esméralda to the Salon of 1864. Despite its acceptance, Renoir once again destroyed his painting. Two of Renoir's works, Portrait de William Sisley (1864) and Soirée d'été, were accepted by the Salon of 1865.

In the mid 1860s, Renoir met Lise Tréhot through his friend, artist Jules Le Coeur, who was intimate with Clémence, Lise's sister. From around 1865 to 1872, Lise modeled for Renoir and was his companion during his early Salon period. Meanwhile, Renoir continued to face rejection at the Salon with Paysage avec deux figures (1866) and Diana (1867), two works featuring Lise as a model. Renoir's innovative work as an Impressionist brought great ridicule and poverty, as he was unable to sell his paintings. He survived by devoting himself to painting portraits for wealthy patrons. It would take almost another forty years for the Salon and the wider art community to recognize and acknowledge his contributions to modern art.

Development and exhibition

Renoir was 26 years old when he began painting Lise in the summer of 1867, possibly in August. It is unclear if the painting was made in the Fontainebleau forest, close to Chailly-en-Brie near Bourron-Marlotte or in Chantilly. Further, it is unknown if the painting was completed in the studio or en plein air. Renoir's friend, Edmond Maître, sent a message to Frédéric Bazille (1841–1870) about Renoir's technique during that summer, writing that Renoir was "painting strangely, having exchanged turpentine for a vile sulphate and abandoned the palette knife for the little syringue that is known to you".

Lise was accepted by the Salon of 1868, and it was critically successful, but according to art historian Gary Tinterow, "the jury had stigmatized Renoir as a rebel, along with Courbet, Manet, and Monet." During the exhibition at the Salon, Lise, along with paintings by Bazille and Monet, were moved to a remote gallery known as the "rubbish dump" (dépotoir). When Renoir's work was exhibited by the Salon early in his career, it was often skied, a process where his paintings were deliberately hung in areas such as high places and corners where it was difficult for the public to view and would receive the least attention.

Description

Art historian John House notes that the work "explore the borderlines between portraiture and genre painting". Lise is a full-length, almost life-size portrait of a young woman, standing in a forest clearing. She wears a small, pork pie straw hat with red ribbons, and a long white muslin dress with a long black sash; the dress is modestly buttoned to the neck and has long sheer sleeves. Lise carries a black lace parasol to shade her head while her body is in strong sunlight, standing on a patch of grass. Renoir's initials "AR" are marked on the trunk of the tree in the shade behind her.

Renoir's decision to name the painting using only the first name of his model indicates, according to House, that this is not a traditional portrait painting, as such works typically used family names or initials. By using Lise's first name as the title, House argues that Renoir was pointing to her status as a mistress (or an unmarried female lover and companion).

Critical reception

In the late 1860s, Renoir was still in the process of developing his own unique style and technique. Critics noted that Lise, like several of Renoir's earlier paintings, Le Cabaret de la mère Antony à Bourron-Marlotte (1866) and Diana (1867), showed the influence of other artists, notably French Realist painter Gustave Courbet. Art critic Zacharie Astruc, who was also Renoir's friend, described Lise as the "likeable Parisian girl in the woods". Astruc and Émile Zola viewed Renoir's Lise as a continuation of Claude Monet's Camille (1866), with Astruc seeing Lise as part of a "trinity", beginning with Édouard Manet's 1863 painting Olympia (followed by Camille and Lise).

There was no major opposition to Lise at the Salon. Tinterow attributes criticism of the painting to Renoir's decision to shadow Tréhot's face in darkness and emphasize the reflection of sunlight from her white dress instead. Several critics noticed this unusual contrast and ridiculed Tréhot's appearance. In Le salon pour rire, French caricaturist André Gill likened Tréhot in Lise to "a nice semisoft cheese out for a stroll", while Ferdinand de Lasteyrie described the painting as "the figure of a fat woman daubed with white".

Other work

A sister painting, Portrait de Lise (Lise tenant un bouquet de fleurs des champs) (1867), was completed around the same time as the larger Lise. In both works, she appears in the forest wearing a similar dress and the same earrings, but in Portrait de Lise she wears a blue sash. A later painting, Femme à l'ombrelle assise dans le jardin (1872), features Lise seated, modeling a similar dress with a red sash, hat, and parasol.

Lise was the first of Renoir's paintings to feature a human figure with light filtering through plant leaves from above. Similar works that make use of this style include The Swing (1876) and Bal du moulin de la Galette (1876). House notes the thematic and narrative similarity between Lise and La Promenade (1870), with expectations of the waiting woman in Lise fulfilled in La Promenade with the private, romantic rendezvous between lovers in the forest, a popular nineteenth century theme.

Provenance

Renoir was unable to sell the painting until Théodore Duret offered him 1,200 francs for the work in 1873. Duret was known as "one of the earliest and most ardent defenders" of the Impressionists. Duret sold it to Paul Durand-Ruel in Paris in 1900, who passed it to the dealer Paul Cassirer in Berlin in 1901. That same year, Karl Ernst Osthaus, a patron of the European avant-garde, paid 18,000 Goldmarks for Lise and brought it to his Folkwang Museum in Hagen, Germany. The painting was moved to Essen when the museum relocated in 1922 as the Museum Folkwang.