Art History News: Renoir at Auction

CHRISTIE’S IMPRESSIONIST AND MODERN ART EVENING SALE ON MAY 12 2016

Leading a selection of several works by Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841-1919),

Madame de Galéà, la méridienne painted in 1912 (estimate: $8,000,000-12,000,000) is a sumptuously clad and bejeweled Madeleine de Galéa, the great love of the legendary modern pictures dealer Ambroise Vollard. This is one of the largest paintings from Renoir’s late career and has been in a private collection since 1984.

Two further works by the artist from The MGM Resorts International Collection include Femme en bleu, painted in 1909 (estimate:$1,000,000-1,500,000),

and La Balayeuse, painted in 1889 (estimate: $1,000,000-1,500,000).

KOLLER ZURICH AUCTION June 26, 2015

Three paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir will lead the selection of Impressionist works offered in the auction.

“La Bergère” was created by the master in c.1902 and is presen-ted with an estimate of CHF 1 to 1.5 million.

“Baigneuse assise, de dos”

and “Bouquet d’anémones”

both originate from 1917, and thus from the late works produced by the artist. They are estimated at CHF 180 000 to 250 000 and CHF 250 000 to 350 000.

Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern Art sale in New York November 7 & 8, 2007

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Femmes dans un jardin is a magnificent landscape executed during the artist’s classic Impressionist period, treating his favorite subject, that of the bourgeois classes in their leisure pursuits (est. $8/12 million). While in a number of paintings on this theme the artist focused on the details of his figures and their costume, in the present work his attention was almost entirely on the nature surrounding them. The lush, rich treatment of the park with its flowerbeds, trees and the path in the present work demonstrates the delight Renoir took in painting nature, drenched in light and shimmering with color.

Sotheby’s 4 November 2009 Evening Sale of Impressionist and Modern Art in New York
Included in the November offering were three works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

Femme au chapeau blanc belongs to a series of oils that Renoir completed in the early 1890s of young women wearing elaborately decorated chapeaux (est. $2.5/3.5 million, £1.5/2 million, €1.8/2.5 million). During the 1890s, Renoir’s life was divided into two distinct parts, both are reflected in his work. On one side were his elite clientele whom he depended upon for portrait commissions and on the other were the lesser-known models, most often young girls, whose youth and beauty enraptured Renoir. While painting formal society portraits sustained the artist’s way of life, his studies of unidentified young women allowed him greater freedom of execution. The present picture is an example of Renoir’s bravura - his rapid feathery brushstrokes lavish attention upon the crisp fabric of the model’s dress, the pleating over her shoulder and the airy crinoline of her hat.

Also by Renoir is Baigneuse, which offers a superb example of his later style,exemplifying his ability to capture the female form with his fluid, loose brushwork (est. $700,000/1million, £400/600,000, €500/700,000). His masterly painting technique builds up a shimmering paint surface that gives his late nudes their distinctive quality; a style that allowed him to showcase an astonishing mastery of a broad range of painterly effects. It was these late monumental nudes that for many comprised Renoir’s greatest artistic achievement and provided an important source of inspiration for Cézanne and Picasso’s neo-classical nudes.

Renoir’s still-lives, including Nature Morte aux Pommes et Poires, are some of the most sensually appealing compositions in art history(est. $350/450,000, £200/300,000, €250/350,000). Rendered with the artist’s characteristically soft palette, these compositions capture the aromatic beauty of each succulent piece of fruit. These deceptively simple still-lives, which proved to be wildly popular among clients of Paul Durand-Ruel, revitalized this age-old subject with an Impressionist flair.

Sotheby’s Evening sale of Impressionist and Modern Art, 8th February 2011

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), La Lecture, deux femmes aux corsages rouge et rose. Est: £2-3million. Photo: Sotheby's

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s La Lecture, deux femmes aux corsages rouge et rose (est: £2-3million) is undoubtedly among the most successful of Renoir’s late large-scale works. It comes to the market with an exceptional history: in 1954, the painting was sold at the Galerie Charpentier in Paris to a private English collector in whose family possession it has remained until now. Its first museum showing since 1938 was in the Philadelphia Museum of Art's landmark exhibition Renoir in the 20th Century held in 2010.

A tender and harmonious portrait, La Lecture is one of the most beautiful, touching and serene of Renoir's late works. Intimate and filled with subtle sensuality, the painting lyrically demonstrates Renoir's masterly ability to portray his figures in an entirely natural way. In later years, success allowed him to paint the sitters who most interested and touched him, especially his family and those with whom he chose to be in contact. Here he magically catches an intimate moment in which two beautiful young women, oblivious to all around them, even the artist, are entranced by the words they are reading.

Christie’s Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale in London on 6 February 2013

L'ombrelle, 1878, by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

was painted during the height of Impressionism (estimate: £4-7million). In this radiant painting, Pierre-Auguste Renoir depicts the quintessential Impressionist subject of the fashionably attired Parisienne within a scene of abundantly flowering nature. A celebration of both female elegance and natural beauty, the subject provided bountiful opportunities for Renoir to deconstruct form and experiment with palette. The variegated brushwork consisting of thick and swirling impasto and small dabs of spontaneous and audaciously applied paint, make L'ombrelle one of the artist’s most experimental works of the latter part of the decade. The picture exemplifies Renoir’s ideal of harmoniously integrating a figure into an outdoor setting, and of capturing the myriad effects of light and shade in a range of dazzling colours. L'ombrelle relates to a sequence of exuberantly painted canvases depicting women in garden settings that Renoir executed in the years immediately following the very first Impressionist exhibition of 1874. Having first explored the theme of the woman with an umbrella or parasol as early as 1867, in

Lise à l'ombrelle, these later works may have been inspired by the example of Claude Monet, whom Renoir had visited at his home in Argenteuil during the summer months of 1873 to 1875.

· Christie’s Impressionist and Modern Art May 4 and 5, 2015

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Portrait of André Bérard, Pastel on Paper, 1889-1890. US $400,000-600,000

Among the star works from the Whitehead Collection to be featured within the May Evening Sale are Amedeo Modigliani’s Portrait de Béatrice Hastings from 1916 (US$7-10million) and Claude Monet’s Paysage de matin (Giverny) (US$6-8million; pictured page one). Together, these works depict the sweeping range of the collection; Modigliani’s portrait representing the dynamism of the European Avant-Garde and Monet’s landscape evoking the purity of French Impressionism with its revelry in light.

While Whitehead stated that each work moved him in different ways, he professed Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Portrait of André Bérard, to be his favorite.
“If I had to spend the rest of my life on a desert island and could take only one of the pictures from my collection with me, I would take this one,” Mr. Whitehead wrote. “It is a simple portrait, done in pastel, and not very large. But I find it completely beautiful. There is such innocence to the boy. Is that my inner self? A happy memory of when my own children were young? I don’t know.”

SOTHEBY’S NOVEMBER 2007

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Femmes dans un jardin is a magnificent landscape executed during the artist’s classic Impressionist period.The lush, rich treatment of the park with its flowerbeds, trees and the path in the present work demonstrates the delight Renoir took in painting nature, drenched in light and shimmering with color.

Sotheby's 2014