Renoir, Pierre-Auguste (1841-1919)
Femme à la perruche (Woman with Parrot)
1871
Oil on canvas, 92.1 x 65.1 cm
Guggenheim Museum, New York
The woman holding the parakeet is Lise Tréhot, an artist’s model and Renoir’s close companion of six years. Tréhot posed extensively for Renoir during the early years of his career, and her youthful features are recognizable in many canvases painted between 1867 and 1872. Renoir likely created this picture in 1871, soon after his return from the Franco-Prussian War and before Tréhot married an architect from a well-to-do family in April 1872, evidently never seeing Renoir again.
Using the feathery, textured brushwork that characterizes his work, even in this proto-Impressionist phase, Renoir depicts Tréhot as a bourgeois lady. Wearing a black taffeta dress with white cuffs and a red sash, she stands in an elegant interior adorned with ornately patterned carpeting and wallpaper, and exotic, verdant houseplants. Though the intimate scene suggests that Renoir has captured a young, upper-middle-class woman playing with her pet bird, the rich yet stifling interior restricts the model’s space, just like that of the parakeet when confined to its gilded cage. The analogy between the woman and the bird is further underscored by the model’s elaborate ruffled dress, appended by bright red plumage. Throughout art history, countless images of women with birds have foregrounded the intimacy and emotional bond between human and animal; in Woman with Parakeet, the bird may also play the role of confidant.
In this portrayal of the daily experience of a fashionable Parisian woman, a life relegated almost exclusively to indoor domestic spaces, the subtle tensions embedded in the painting frustrate the possibility of a purely pleasurable, innocent reading. Instead, Woman with Parakeet engages with the very contradictions that governed the lives of nineteenth-century bourgeois French women. (Guggenheim)
See also:
• Tréhot, Lise (1848-1922)