Renoir Sat Two Girls By The Water And Let The Decade Soften

Jeunes Filles au bord de la mer, 1894. Fifty-five by forty-six centimetres. Signed lower right. Private collection. Not the Met seashore. Not Puvis. This canvas.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted Jeunes Filles au bord de la mer in 1894. Oil on canvas. Height 55 cm, width 46 cm. The sig sits bottom right: Renoir. The picture has lived in private hands. It came out for The Impressionists in Private at the Musée Marmottan Monet from February to July 2014, then for Impressionisti Segreti at Palazzo Bonaparte in Rome from October 2019 into June 2020. Gilles Néret reproduced it in Renoir, peintre du bonheur (Taschen, 2001). That is the public life of a work that otherwise stays off the wall-label circuit of the Met and Orsay.

The title is a trap. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes used almost the same words in 1879 for a large, matte, antique-face canvas now at Orsay: 205 by 156 cm, girls as simplified profiles against a flattened sea. Renoir’s 1894 picture is a third of that height and a different climate. Another Renoir, Au bord de la mer (By the Seashore), 1883, hangs at the Metropolitan Museum: Aline Charigot in a wicker chair, Normandy or Guernsey remember in the studio. Do not collapse the three. This piece is the 1894 private oil, young girl, water’s edge, small format.

He was fifty-three. Born Limoges, 25 February 1841. Dead Cagnes-sur-Mer, December 1919. By 1894 the Impressionist group shows were history. The 1880s “dry” or Ingres period had already happened: harder contour after Italy, Grandes Baigneuses, a crisis of line. Then he told Durand-Ruel he had taken up again, never to abandon, the old soft touch. The 1894 seaside girls sit on that return. Feathery load. Warm flesh against cool water. Leisure as the subject he never really rely.

 

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French painting in the last third of the nineteenth century cannot leave girls alone at the edge of water. Bathing, wait, talk, not quite swim. The sea is a backdrop that excuses undress and also excuses doing nothing. Puvis made the motif monumental and still. Renoir made it intimate and slightly busy with hats and cloth.

The 1894 canvas, as catalogue and as reproduce, gather young women in casual rest by the water. Light clothes. Company. A landscape that does not demand a map. Artchive and the Wikimedia file agree on date, medium, private collection. Descriptions of the group emphasize repose and proximity more than a named bay. That vagueness is useful. Renoir’s later outdoor figures often look like they could be moved from one coast to another without the picture break. Guernsey 1883 had Moulin Huet in the notes. 1894 does not require a ferry timetable.

Hats matter in these pictures. Straw, flower, a brim that hides a face. One profile, one turned companion: the conversation the viewer is not in. Renoir liked that closed circuit. Two or three girls make a world that does not need a male witness inside the frame. The sea only has to be enough blue-green to prove they are not in a parlor.

Exhibitions that pull private Impressionist pictures into public rooms are how this canvas gets seen at all. Marmottan 2014. Palazzo Bonaparte after. Then back behind a door. The reproduction in Néret is how most people will meet it. A Taschen plate is not a wall. It is still more than nothing.

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Renoir’s Italy trip of 1881 and 1882 is the hinge every biography uses. Raphael and fresco solid against the broken stroke of Argenteuil. He came home want draw again. The mid-1880s pictures can look enamel-hard next to the 1876 Moulin de la Galette. By the late 1880s he was writing to his dealer about returning to softness. 1894 is deep enough into that return that the seaside girls do not feel like a manifesto. They feel like a habit he trusted again.

Rheumatism would later knot the hands. Cagnes would become the last studio climate. 1894 is before the worst of that, still a body that can sit outside or invent outside from sketches. Whether this canvas was finish on a beach or in a room is not publish in the short notices. Many Renoir seasides of the 1880s were studio conclusions. The 1894 picture’s small size makes either possible. Fifty-five centimetres is a conversation picture, not a salon machine.

He kept painting young women in pairs and groups: piano, meadow, water. The motif is affection and idle time, which later taste sometimes reads as too easy. The counter is craft. Flesh that holds light without becoming porcelain. Cloth that is weather. Water that is a temperature, not a map. When the touch goes slack the pictures die. When it holds, as the 1894 plate suggests it does, the ease is the assiduous. 

Limoges porcelain work in youth, Paris studio years, the Impressionist exhibitions, the dealer relationship with Durand-Ruel: all of that sits behind two girls who will never be named in a wall text because the collection is private. Anonymity of sitters is part of the genre. They are types of youth, not Cahen d’Anvers daughters with later biographies. Pink and Blue is a different canvas and a different fate.

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Forty-six centimetres across is not enough sea to be a seascape. It is enough to prove air. Renoir’s greens and flesh pinks do the rest. The Impressionist label still fits 1894 in the market sense. In the studio sense he had already left the group’s weather reports for something closer to a permanent Sunday.

Private collection means the picture’s job now is to hang in a room that is not yours. Museums borrow it when they want the “secret Impressionists” hook. Then it goes home. That rhythm is common for mid-size Renoirs that never enter the Havemeyer or Barnes pipelines. The Barnes has children on the Guernsey shore from 1883. The Met has Aline in the chair. This 1894 pair lives elsewhere.

Looking at a reproduction, you get the company first. Then the hats. Then the sense that the water is a strip, not a destination. Nobody is about to swim. They have already decided to stay. That decision is the picture’s plot. Renoir’s late-middle work often stops there: stay, talk, let the light move.

He would live another twenty-five years. Cagnes, sculpture with assistants, more bathers, more roses. Jeunes Filles au bord de la mer is a pause in that line, a small oil that keeps the girls dress and the sea in the corner. Puvis had made the same title severe. Renoir made it social. The difference is almost the whole argue between those two rooms at Orsay and this canvas you cannot walk into unless a private door opens.

Signed lower right. 1894. Two girls. Water. The decade had already chosen softness again. The picture is what that choice looks like when the subject is only company and a coast.