Renoir, Pierre-Auguste (1841-1919)
Jeune femme au chapeau vert (Young woman with green hat)
s.d.
Pastel on paper, 56.5 x 43.5 cm
Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires
In this undated pastel by Pierre Renoir, a woman wearing a large hat and fur-collared coat poses in three-quarter profile. Although this quick sketch is surely the result of a sitting in front of the model, her face is expressionless and there are no distinctive features, beyond the reddish color of her hair, that contribute to her identification. The clear pastel stains are laid out decisively on the paper, making evident his mastery of the craft, coinciding with the testimony of Ambroise Vollard who maintained that: “Renoir ‘attacked’ the canvas, as was his custom, without the slightest prior search to place the model. They were stains, nothing more than stains and more stains,” managing to capture a head in a single sitting.
The MNBA pastel is related to the rapid studies of busts of women with hats that Renoir made, towards the last decade of the 19th century, to study the effects of light and colour. In fact, in his introduction to L’Atelier de Renoir, his friend the painter Albert André described his studio as full of “laboratory searches” in which the artist returned again and again to the same head, the same torso, the same flowers like the “mechanical discharge of a man who lived with a brush in his hand”.
The work belonged to Antonio Santamarina, who also owned another important work by Renoir, L’Atelier du peintre, Rue St. Georges from 1876, which shows the colleagues who frequented the artist’s studio. Jeune femme au chapeau vert came from the gallery of Durand-Ruel, the first dealer interested in marketing his work as early as the second Impressionist exhibition in 1876. (María Isabel Baldasarre | MNBA)