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PIERRE AUGUSTE RENOIR
The Parisian/La Parisienne (1874)
Oil on cream printed canvas
160cm X 106cm/63in X 41 3/4in

Essentially a Parisian himself by upbringing and allegiance, if not by birth, Renoir spent most of the 1870s working in a large studio on the rue St. Georges - where this painting was doubtless executed. His artisan background and early training as a painter on porcelain gave Renoir a love of eighteenth century French Rococo themes of leisure, and an ap-preciation of those artists' sumptuous, colorful handling. He infused the pleasurable side of the contemporary modern leisure activities, which he painted, with an idyllic eighteenth century sensuality. During the 1870s, perhaps under the influence of Monet, Renoir painted mainly outdoor scenes, both landscapes and figures, but he also executed many indoor studies of groups or portraits or, as here, of typical Parisian characters. In the 1860s he had attempted one or two winter scenes, but, pre-ferring the warmth and light of summer, he abandoned subjects depicting wintery lights and weather. Even his indoor studies from the 1870s onwards, infused with the knowledge from his observations of outdoor sunlight, gave an effect of pervasive warm light and cool blue-violet shadows.

Renoir's paint surfaces, as in The Parisian, were generally much thinner than the stiff textural impastos of the other Impressionists. He usually added a mixture of linseed oil and turpentine to his colors to make them thinner but still juicy. To avoid excessive and thus dangerous overmixing of colors on his palette, he tended to apply them wet into wet directly onto the canvas, slurring them together where necessary. The other Impressionists, especially Monet and Pissarro, achieved light-reflective luminosity in their paint surfaces by using chalky, stiff paint mixtures dominated by lead white, dragged to give opaque, vibrant effects. Renoir, by contrast, used his thin juicy trans-lucent or scumbled colors to allow the bril-liance of the ground to show through, reflecting color-enriched light back to the viewer. No dull earth colors tone down the brightness of Renoir's palette here.

The Parisian was executed on a non-standard sized canvas format, which had to be made to order. The canvas weave is fine. and the com-mercial ground is a carefully selected cream color, sufficiently thickly applied to leave the surface fairly smooth. Where the cream ground shows through the thin paint layer, its color is actively exploited among the applied colors of the paint layer. This technique reduces the need for an excessive build-up or reworking of the picture itself. The cream of the ground is very effectively used amongst the blues of the dress. Traditionally, the shadows were the most thinly painted, transparent parts, and high-lights were built up in opaque impasto to create an almost physical relief on the paint surface. In Renoir's picture, the highlights are the,thinnest parts. By diluting his cobalt blue until t translucent and applying it with deft, descrip-e tive brushwork, almost like a wash, he has left i the cream ground to glow through the blue s and stand for the highlights.

Where shadows were required, helping to i structure the form and folds in the dress. Renoir f has simply used thicker, undiluted blue, which - is thus deeper and more saturated in color. Wet-in-wet smudging of yellow into the blue in ; the darkest parts, deepens the shadows further i without sullying them with black or brown. In ' places, the sparest touch of lead white was • worked into the wet blue to heighten the lights. ' Slurring the colors gives a more colorful, lively effect than mechanical premixing on the palette. Renoir's overlaying of the cream ground with transparent blue has an optical coloristic effect, too. Warm and cool colors, or colors situated more or less opposite each other on the color circle, enhance each other optically. Thus on the dress in The Parisian, the thinly washed blue over cream produces an optical effect of pink so, by contrast, the blue appears cooler, the cream warmer, pinker. Cezanne's Large Bathers (cl898-1905) exploits similar effects.

In The Parisian Renoir's composition is simple and direct, with many precedents, especially in
Manet's single-figure studies from the mid 1860s. Like Manet, Renoir used a full-face light, falling almost directly onto his model, but Renoir's lighting is softer, more diffuse than that adopted by Manet which produced strong tonal contrasts. Also, as in Manet's work. the figure is indistinctly located in space - no wall or floor angles define the room. and the figure's cast shadow is minimal. Renoir further simpli-fied his composition during the painting pro-cess, obliterating blue drapes which originally hung to either side of the figure, and are now just visible because the thin paint layer has become more transparent with age.

This picture was exhibited by Renoir with six other works at the first Impressionist exhi-bition. held in the old second floor studio of the famous Parisian photographer Nadar. at 35 boulevard des Capucines. During the month-long show, which opened on 15 April 1874 just prior to the annual Salon exhibition, the criticism received by Renoir was by no means unsympathetic. In fact. it was only when the Impressionist style persisted and spread in popularity in the later 1870s that criticism became more hostile.

Throughout this decade Renoir continued to submit his work to the Salon as well as show-ing with his Impressionist friends. This earned him the scorn of hardline opponents of the Salon like Degas. Thus, like Manet, he remained committed to seeking official recognition for his work although, unlike Manet, he was also dedicated to independent shows. By the late 1870s, his work was beginning to achieve acceptance and success, at least among dis-cerning private collectors, and the important dealer Paul Durand-Ruel bought his work regularly when finances permitted.

Unlike Degas' depictions of Parisian women, Renoir's pictures like The Parisian show working women at leisure rather than engaged in their trades. The slightly outmoded dress shows this to be a lower class woman sporting her Sunday finery. Renoir's use of a warm, flooding daylight, softly diffused over the figure, unifies the composition and reduces tonal contrasts to a minimum. Instead of lights and darks, warm and cool hues are used to model form, with the cream ground glowing through the thin transparent blues to stand as highhghts. The paint layer is thin and varies between fine transparent layers and delicately rubbed or scumbled, opaque veils of color. The stability of Renoir's painting method was confirmed by Signac's observations on the picture when he saw it in 1898. He said 'The dress is blue, an intense andpure blue which, by contrast, makes the flesh yellow, and, by its reflection, green. The tricks of color are admirably recorded.
And it is simple, it is beautiful, anditis fresh. One would think that this picture painted 20 years ago had only left the studio today.'

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