PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR | Marie Dupuis tenant un miroir avec un portrait de Coco or Gabrielle tenant un miroir avec un portrait de Coco

Mme Schwob d'Héricourt, Paris (acquired from the artist)
Alex Maguy, Paris (acquired by 1962)
Mr and Mrs François L. Schwarz, New York (acquired by 1974)
Didier Imbert Fine Art, Paris (acquired by June 1985)
Mrs Meta C. Schwarz, Paris & New York
Sale: Sotheby's, London, 29th March 1988, lot 9
Hermann Schnabel, Hamburg
Galerie du Carlton, Cannes
Private Collection, Germany (acquired from the above circa 2005. Sold: Christies, London, 10th February 2011, lot 438)
Purchased at the above sale by the present owner

Tokyo, Isetan Museum; Kyoto, Kyoto Municipal Museum, Renoir, 1979, no. 69, illustrated
Paris, Grand Palais, La Femme, 1986, n.n.
Tübingen, Kunsthalle Tübingen, Renoir, 1996, no. 94, illustrated in colour

Francois Daulte & Jopseph Focarino, Privately Owned Paintings and Drawings from the Collection of François L. Schwarz, New York, 1974, illustrated p. 57
Guy-Patrice & Michel Dauberville (eds.), Renoir, Catalogue raisonné des tableaux, pastels, dessins et aquarelles, 1903-1910, Paris, 2012, vol. IV, no. 3258, illustrated p. 341

Please contact the Impressionist and Modern Art Department (Phoebe.Liu@sothebys.com) for the condition report for this lot.
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From the 1880s to the later stages of his career, Pierre-Auguste Renoir developed a very personal, intimate style of portraiture which focused on family, close friends and neighbours. One recurring feature within this trope is the depiction of women at their toilette posing before a mirror.  'The ostensible theme,' John House has written, 'is self-adornment and women’s preoccupation with appearances; but the vision that is being realized is of course Renoir’s own: … [she] prepares herself for display, she displays herself to the painter, who posed her thus, and to the viewer of the picture' (John House in Renoir (exhibition catalogue), Hayward Gallery, London, 1985, p. 282). The theme draws upon a rich tradition, dating back to Renaissance vanitas portraits, in which the woman in front of a mirror, gazing at her own image, joins the viewer in treating herself as an object of visual pleasure. As Kirk Varnedoe has commented, 'Renoir’s canon of female beauty seemed to embody a special marriage between classicizing idealism and a distinctly modern, specifically French sense of sophisticated pleasure' (Kirk Varnedoe in Masterpieces from the David and Peggy Rockefeller Collection: Manet to Picasso (exhibition catalogue), New York, 1994, p. 34). The sitter for the present work was originally thought to be Gabrielle Renard, who at the age of 16 joined the Renoir household in 1894, a month before Jean was born. Gabrielle remained with the family for the next twenty years, until her marriage to the American painter Conrad Slade in 1912. She soon became indispensable to the Renoirs, not only looking after the children, but also modelling frequently for Renoir, both as the protagonist of his domestic scenes and as the voluptuous nude, a genre that preoccupied the artist post-1900. However more recently, it has been suggested that the sitter is Marie Dupuis, another of Renoir's favoured models, as she typically wore her hair pulled back in this style. Affectionately called la boulangère by the artist, Marie Dupuis hailed from his wife's home town of Essoyes and joined the household as a servant in 1899.

In the present work, Marie is portrayed in a private moment, adjusting her necklace in the mirror with a portrait of 'Coco' (Renoir’s third son, born in 1901) on the wall behind her. Although the present work is less sensual or erotic than many of the works which Renoir painted of Gabrielle during this period, as the sleeve of Marie’s satin dress falls from her shoulder Renoir generates a sense of intimacy. In characteristic fashion the artist portrays a surface richly furnished with colour and texture, where soft shapes imply an immediacy which belies the care and incisiveness that Renoir’s best paintings possess.

When painting a female figure, Renoir revelled in the expression of the youthful heart of his sitter; the delicate softness of the skin, the inquisitive fascination with objects and people, and the warmth of their character. As Georges Rivière was to comment, 'In Renoir's figure painting, portraiture deserves a place unto itself. For no other artist has looked so deeply into his sitter's soul, nor captured its essence with such economy' (quoted in Colin Bailey, Renoir's Portraits, Impression of an Age, Ottawa, 1997, p. 1).



This work is accompanied by an Attestation of Inclusion from the Wildenstein Institute, and it will be included in the forthcoming Renoir Digital Catalogue Raisonné, currently being prepared under the sponsorship of the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, Inc.