Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Maurice Gangnat, Paris (acquired from the artist. Sold: Hôtel Drouot, Collection Maurice Gangnat, 24th & 25th June 1925, lot 149)

Philippe Gangnat (son of the above; purchased at the above sale)

Thence by descent to the present owner

Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art (on long-term loan 1938-48)

Paris, Galerie Durand-Ruel, Renoir, collection Maurice Gangnat, 1955, no. 47

Düsseldorf, Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Renoir. Sammlung Gangnat, Paris, 1956, no. 47 (titled Frau mit vase and as dating from 1907)

London, Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., Renoir, 1956, no. 30, illustrated in the catalogue (as dating from 1907)

Georges Rivière, Renoir et ses amis, Paris, 1921, illustrated p. 257

William Gaunt, Renoir, London, 1952, illustrated pl. 101

Pierre Cabanne, 'Sous les oliviers des Collettes, le dernier sourire de Renoir', in Paris Match, Paris, 1957, illustrated p. 51

Guy-Patrice & Michel Dauberville, Renoir. Catalogue raisonné des tableaux, pastels, dessins et aquarelles, Paris, 2014, vol. 5, no. 4185, illustrated p. 322

La Femme au bouquet is a remarkable example of Renoir’s late paintings, treating his favourite theme, that of a woman in an intimate interior setting. By this time in his career Renoir had achieved significant acclaim and financial independence, and as he was no longer obliged to paint commissioned portraits, he cherished the opportunities to paint intimate portraits of those who surrounded him. The themes of young women engaged in an activity such as bathing, reading, playing the piano or – as in the present work – arranging a bouquet of flowers, were among the artist’s favourites, and were also popular with his audience and collectors.

The sitter in La Femme au bouquet is Andrée Heuschling, nicknamed Dédée (1900-1979), a local bakery girl who joined the Renoir household in order to help care for the ageing artist, and would be his last model. The year after the artist’s death she married his son, the film director Jean Renoir, and acted in several of his films. Isabelle Gaëtan wrote: ‘From her first meeting with Renoir (between 1915 and 1917 according to accounts), Andrée stood out among the regular visitors to Les Collettes, where she became the painter’s favorite model. She married Jean Renoir in 1920, and four years later began a career as an actress under the name of Catherine Hessling, in one of the first films scripted by her husband. As Jean confirms in the book he dedicated to his father, Dédée seems to have brightened up the last years of the painter’s life: “she was sixteen years old, red-haired, plump, and her skin ‘took the light’ better than any model that Renoir had ever had in his life. She… was gay, and cast over my father the revivifying spell of her joyous youth”’ (I. Gaëtan in Renoir in the 20th Century (exhibition catalogue), Galeries Nationales, Paris; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles & Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, 2009-10, p. 342).

Dédée posed for some of Renoir’s most celebrated late works, including Femme à la mandolin and Le Concert (fig. 2), now in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. Writing about Renoir’s last masterpiece Les Baigneuses, which reflects the artist’s delight in painting his young model, John House commented: ‘According to Albert André, the beauty of this “superb redhead” was the incentive he needed to undertake his last paintings’ (J. House in Renoir (exhibition catalogue), Hayward Gallery, London; Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris & Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1985-86, p. 288). In several works, including the present composition, Dédée is depicted in the same exotic blouse which she is wearing in a photograph posing next to the artist (fig. 3). Renoir’s fascination with costumes certainly brings to mind a similar affinity reflected in the paintings of Henri Matisse, who was Renoir’s friend and neighbour in the south of France at this time, and a visitor to Les Collettes.

The first owner of the present work was Maurice Gangnat, a Parisian collector with an extreme fondness for Renoir's paintings, in particular his small-scale, freely composed landscapes, still-lifes and figure studies. From the time he began collecting in 1905 until the artist's death in 1919, Gangnat amassed over 150 of Renoir's works, while cultivating a strong friendship with the artist. A photograph of his Paris home shows a part of his collection, with La Femme au bouquet taking pride of place above the grand piano (fig. 1). Gangnat often visited Renoir at Cagnes, where the artist painted his portrait in 1916 (fig. 4). As Jean Renoir later recalled about Gangnat: 'When he entered the studio, his glance always fell on the canvas which Renoir considered the best. “He had an eye!” my father stated’ (J. Renoir, Renoir, My Father, London, 1962, p. 448). La Femme au bouquet was sold in the auction of Maurice Gangnat’s collection held in Paris in June 1925, where it was acquired by his son Philippe Gangnat, and has remained in the same family to the present day.