Gabriel Gruchy | An old seller of flowers

Gabriel Gruchy (French, 1831-1906) An old seller of flowers

Pierre-Auguste Renoir | Still LIfe with Glass and Lemon

Pierre-Auguste Renoir | La Loge (Theatre Box) 1874

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s La Loge (The Theatre Box), 1874, is one of the masterpieces of Impressionism and a major highlight of The Courtauld Gallery’s collection. Its depiction of an elegant couple on display in a loge, or box at the theatre, epitomises the Impressionists’ interest in the spectacle of modern life.

In celebration of The Courtauld Institute of Art’s 75th anniversary the exhibition Renoir at the Theatre: Looking at ‘La Loge’, on view from 21 February to 25 May 2008, unites La Loge for the first time with Renoir’s other treatments of the subject and logepaintings by contemporaries, including Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas. Concentrating on the early years of Impressionism during the 1870s, the exhibition explores how these artists used the loge to capture the excitement and changing nature of fashionable Parisian society.

Renoir | Two Vases of Chrysanthemums, 1884

• "If you paint the leaf on a tree without using a model, your imagination will only supply you with a few leaves; but Nature offers you millions, all on the same tree. No two leaves are exactly the same. The artist who paints only what is in his mind must very soon repeat himself".


• "Se dipingi una foglia su un albero senza usare un modello, la tua immaginazione potrà' fornirti solo alcuni tipi di foglie; ma la natura ti offre milioni di foglie, tutte sullo stesso albero. Non ci sono due foglie esattamente uguali. L'artista che dipinge solo ciò che nella sua mente molto presto ripeterà se stesso".

Pierre-Auguste Renoir🎨

Pierre-Auguste Renoir | La partie de croquet, 1895

"Towards 1883 there was a kind of rupture in my work. I had come to the end of Impressionism and reached the conclusion that I could neither paint nor draw. In a word, I had reached a dead end…”. (Renoir to Vollard, cit. after H. Grabers, p. 235f.)

In the early 1880s, Renoir fell into a crisis, which led him disengage himself from his Impressionist style. Thereupon he travelled to Italy, where he studied closely the painters of the Renaissance, especially Raphael.

Enthused by their techniques, he began to introduce new pictorial elements into his works. He moved closer to the classical style and again set great store by the human form and most especially a finely detailed painting style - which is easily recognised in “Le Grand Baigneuses” of 1884.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir | Confidence, 1897

From Christie's auction house | - This painting will be included in the forthcoming catalogue critique of Pierre-Auguste Renoir🎨 being prepared by the Wildenstein Institute established from the archives of François Daulte, Durand-Ruel, Venturi, Vollard and Wildenstein.

Painted in 1897, Confidence captures a couple in a private moment of conversation, the woman's lips slightly parted as she leans in to speak, the man's head lowered in a posture of concentration.

The intimacy of the scene is emphasized by the extremely close vantage point, with both heads abruptly cropped by the edges of the canvas. Renoir's focus is on the figures' overlapping profiles, which interlock like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

The dialogue between their forms is heightened by the light that enters from the direction of the viewer, reflecting off the side of the man's face while casting the woman's features into shadow. At the same time, the scene is unified by the warm, restrained palette of cream, russet, and dark brown.

Renoir | Still Life with roses