Introduction Introduction Sterling and Francine clark art inStitute | WilliamStoWn, massachuSettS NINETEENTH-CENTURY EUROPEAN PAINTINGS diStributed by yale univerSity Press | NeW haven and london AT THE STERLING AND FRANCINE CLARK ART INSTITUTE VOLUME TWO Edited by Sarah Lees With an essay by Richard Rand and technical reports by Sandra L. Webber With contributions by Katharine J. Albert, Philippe Bordes, Dan Cohen, Kathryn Calley Galitz, Alexis Goodin, Marc Gotlieb, John House, Simon Kelly, Richard Kendall, Kathleen M. Morris, Leslie Hill Paisley, Kelly Pask, Elizabeth A. Pergam, Kathryn A. Price, Mark A. Roglán, James Rosenow, Zoë Samels, and Fronia E. Wissman 4 5 Nineteenth-Century European Paintings at the Sterling and Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Francine Clark Art Institute is published with the assistance of the Getty Foundation and support from the National Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. Endowment for the Arts. Nineteenth-century European paintings at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute / edited by Sarah Lees ; with an essay by Richard Rand and technical reports by Sandra L. Webber ; with contributions by Katharine J. Albert, Philippe Bordes, Dan Cohen, Kathryn Calley Galitz, Alexis Goodin, Marc Gotlieb, John House, Simon Kelly, Richard Kendall, Kathleen M. Morris, Leslie Hill Paisley, Kelly Pask, Elizabeth A. Produced by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute Pergam, Kathryn A. Price, Mark A. Roglán, James Rosenow, 225 South Street, Williamstown, Massachusetts 01267 Zoë Samels, Fronia E. Wissman. www.clarkart.edu volumes cm Includes bibliographical references and index. Curtis R. Scott, Director of Publications ISBN 978-1-935998-09-9 (clark hardcover : alk. paper) — and Information Resources ISBN 978-0-300-17965-1 (yale hardcover : alk. paper) Dan Cohen, Special Projects Editor 1. Painting, European—19th century—Catalogs. 2. Painting— Katherine Pasco Frisina, Production Editor Massachusetts—Williamstown—Catalogs. 3. Sterling and Anne Roecklein, Managing Editor Francine Clark Art Institute—Catalogs. I. Lees, Sarah, editor Michael Agee, Photographer of compilation. II. Rand, Richard. III. Webber, Sandra L. IV. Title. Laurie Glover, Visual Resources V. Title: 19th-century European paintings at the Sterling and Julie Walsh, Program Assistant Francine Clark Art Institute. Mari Yoko Hara and Michelle Noyer-Granacki, ND457.S74 2012 Publications Interns 759.9409’0340747441—dc23 2012030510 Designed by Susan Marsh Composed in Meta by Matt Mayerchak Copyedited by Sharon Herson Details: Bibliography edited by Sophia Wagner-Serrano title page: Camille Pissarro, The Louvre from the Pont Neuf Index by Kathleen M. Friello (cat. 253) Proofread by June Cuff ner opposite copyright page: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Production by The Production Department, Jane Avril (cat. 331) Whately, Massachusetts preceding page 474: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Onions (cat. 280) Printed on 135 gsm Gardapat Kiara pages 890–91: Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, The Women of Color separations and printing by Trifolio, Verona Amphissa (cat. 3) © 2012 Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Distributed by Yale University Press, New Haven and London P. O. Box 209040, New Haven, Connecticut 06520-9040 www.yalebooks.com/art Printed and bound in Italy 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Pierre-Auguste Renoir waistband can be seen running across her thigh. This 287 | ​Bather Arranging Her Hair 1885 garment may be contrasted with the far less clearly defined material across the legs of the 1881 Blonde Oil on canvas, 91.9 x 73 cm Bather; together with the hint of underarm hair, it Lower left: Renoir. 85. gives the present canvas a degree of specificity that 1955.589 contrasts with the wholly inexplicit context and setting in which the figure is placed. Moreover, the figure’s Bather Arranging Her Hair is one of the most crisply gesture, as she tends her hair, and the tiny detail of defined and harshly contoured of all Renoir’s figures her eyelashes, indicated with almost a miniaturist’s painted during his period of technical experimenta- precision, suggest a trace of coquettishness wholly tion in the mid-1880s. Along with Bathers (Philadel- absent from the 1881 Blonde Bather. phia Museum of Art), completed in 1887, it makes the Bather Arranging Her Hair belongs to a lineage of extreme point of his rejection of the Impressionist images of seated naked women seen from behind. technique of absorbing figures into their surroundings It carries echoes of both Jean-Auguste-Dominique and into the ambient atmosphere. Ingres’s “Valpinçon” Bather of 1808 (Musée du Louvre, The figure is sharply differentiated from the back- Paris), placed in an “Oriental” interior, and Gustave ground. In the main, this is achieved by contrasts Courbet’s La Source of 1868 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris), of color and paint texture; only around the model’s which shows a precisely modeled, full-bodied figure buttocks, belly, and thigh is a soft blue line used to beside a stream in deep woodland. Renoir noted his demarcate it. Strongly lit from the front, the model’s admiration for Ingres’s oil paintings in a letter from skin is treated in simple, relatively flatly painted Italy in 1881, and Ingres was clearly an example that planes of dense impasto, mostly in soft pinks and he had in view as he sought to reintroduce draftsman- creams, with only slight color modulations suggest- ship into his art.1 He would have renewed his knowl- ing the play of light across her form. The simplicity of edge of Courbet’s art at the retrospective of his work her coloring, with dark hair set against light skin, sets held at the École des Beaux-Arts in May 1882, in which the figure decisively apart from the background. La Source was included, under the title Baigneuse vue The model is shown seated on a grassy area amid de dos. In some ways Renoir’s canvas is also com- an irregular and partly rocky terrain, with some hint parable to Pierre Puvis de Chavannes’s Young Girls of waves on a shoreline at lower left; but the space in by the Sea, shown at the 1879 Salon (Musée d’Orsay, the right foreground is quite unclear, and the figure is Paris), in which no extraneous details detract from not depicted in a credible three-dimensional relation- the semi-clad female figures beside the sea; Renoir ship to her immediate surroundings. Beyond, we see and Puvis shared a model in these years—the future distant cliffs across a wide bay, but these, too, seem painter Suzanne Valadon. to be generic; they cannot be identified as represent- Renoir’s figure, nevertheless, is quite unlike these ing any specific site, and they closely resemble the precedents in the synthesis, in some ways discon- background in the second version of Blonde Bather, certing, of a tautly contoured figure in a seemingly painted in 1882 (fig. 279.1). The entire setting is timeless setting with luminous, high-key color. The treated in clear and variegated light-toned color, with painting was analyzed with great sympathy by Julius the addition of much white, forming a kaleidoscopic Meier-Graefe in 1911, in the first monograph published backdrop beyond the figure. In contrast to the softly on Renoir; a drawing after this picture even appeared brushed background of the 1881 Blonde Bather (cat. on the cover of the book. Meier-Graefe characterized 279), the handling here is crisper and stiffer, with the figure as a modern Venus: “This Venus Anadyo- areas where sequences of parallel brushstrokes are mene does not borrow her charms from any antique reminiscent of the recent work of Paul Cézanne. They sculpture. She testifies to her origins in a way more are less rigorously parallel than Cézanne’s, however, credible to our modern ideas; she is truly woman born and Renoir, unlike Cézanne, did not use these strokes from the waves. Renoir draws her brilliant enamel out to evoke colored modeling, but rather to create a set from the colored beauty of the atmosphere that sur- of textures that act as a foil to the figure. rounds her, and thus avoids the immobile isolation of The fabric around the figure’s legs appears to painted modeling.” 2 represent an item of clothing rather than a towel or The visible cracking in the paint surface of the fig- generic drapery, since what seems to be an elastic ure, and particularly in her hair, suggests that this was 694 287 Pierre-Auguste Renoir one of the canvases in which Renoir tried to reduce the Fezzi 1972, p. 116, no. 619, ill. (French ed., p. 113, no. 581, ill.); quantity of medium that he added to his color;3 cer- White 1972, pp. 173–75, ill.; Pach 1973, pp. 28, 53, ill.; White tainly the dense superimposed paint layers here did 1973, pp. 111, 113, fig. 20; Fouchet 1974, p. 48, ill.; Callen 1978, p. 87, no. 69, ill.; Kelder 1980, pp. 236, 438 438, ill. (2nd ed., not fully bond together. The somewhat chalky tonality pp. 211, 438, fig. 208); Brooks 1981, pp. 70–71, no. 31, ill.; of the canvas also suggests his interest in the visual Lucie-Smith 1981, pp. 94–95, ill.; White 1984, pp. 10, 150–51, qualities of fresco painting, something that Puvis de 174, 184, ill.; Shimada 1985, pl. 8; Wadley 1987, p. 189, ill.; Chavannes was exploring in his use of oil paint in Eitner 1988, vol. 1, pp. 383, 385, vol. 2, fig. 356 (rev. ed., these years. The sleekness and fullness of finish on p.