Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Private Collection, Japan
Acquired from the above by the present owner

The canvas is not lined. The colours are bright and fresh. There is a fine line of craquelure to the upper left of the figure's eye at left. UV examination does not reveal any signs of retouching. This work is in overall very good original condition.
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Painted with real affection, this engaging portrait of Renoir’s son, Pierre, fully captures the character of its adorable subject. Dressed in a stripy tunic, the young boy is the picture of healthy childhood, with vivid auburn curls, rosy cheeks, and the hint of a smile playing at the corner of his mouth. Renoir had painted numerous commissioned portraits of children in the earlier part of his career, but following the births of Pierre in 1885, and then Jean and Claude in 1894 and 1901 respectively, he frequently turned to his sons as a source of inspiration. Pierre was first painted as a babe in arms, as the model for Renoir’s paintings on the theme of maternity in which he transformed the image of his future wife nursing the infant Pierre into an archetype of natural motherhood. In contrast, this portrait of his growing son is highly individualised with the close-up format and generalised background creating a real sense of intimacy.

Portrait de Pierre Renoir coincided with an important period of development in Renoir’s œuvre. In the early 1880s, Renoir experienced something of a crisis, feeling that he had come to the end of what he could achieve with Impressionism, and following a period spent travelling abroad, his style underwent a dramatic change. Returning to classical examples, Renoir experimented with a more formal style that reasserted the importance of the drawn line in his work and it was only towards the end of the decade that this approach would begin to soften. Jean Renoir suggests that the arrival of his brother precipitated this gradual move away from the sharply defined lines of Renoir’s ‘dry manner’, ‘The birth of my brother Pierre was to cause a definitive revolution in Renoir’s life… As he eagerly sketched his son, in order to remain true to himself he concentrated on rendering the velvety flesh of the child; and through this very submission, Renoir began to rebuild his inner world’ (Jean Renoir quoted in N. Wadley (ed.), Renoir. A Retrospective, New York, 1987, p. 166). In the present work Renoir amalgamates both styles, combining a firmness of line with the warmth and delicacy of handling that characterised his earlier works to create a lively and affectionate portrait of his young son.