Renoir, Pierre-Auguste (1841-1919)
Jean dessinant (The Artist’s Son, Jean, Drawing)
1901
Oil on canvas, 45.09 × 54.61 cm
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond
The simplified palette of this portrait of Renoir’s second son, Jean, is limited to a range of grays and browns. The composition’s shallow depth of focus and symmetry draws the viewer’s eye into the space of the young boy’s creative effort. Renoir’s affectionate representation of his son’s simple and innocent activity pays tribute to 18th-century genre scenes, particularly the portraits of children made by French artist Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin (1699-1779).
Jean Renoir would grow up to become a groundbreaking international filmmaker with a career that spanned the silent era into the late 1960s. As an adult, he recounted the circumstances behind the creation of this particular work: “I was myself exactly seven when the painting was done. I had caught a cold and could not go to school, and my father took the opportunity to use me as a model. To keep me quiet, he suggested that a pencil and piece of paper should be given to me and he convinced me to draw figures of animals while he himself was drawing me.” (VMFA)
See also:
• Renoir, Jean (1894-1979)