Lise with a Parasol () is an oil on canvas painting by French artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir, created in 1867 during his early Salon period. The full-length painting depicts model Lise Tréhot posing in a forest. She wears a white muslin dress and holds a black lace parasol to shade her from the sunlight, which filters down through the leaves, contrasting her face in the shadow and her body in the light, highlighting her dress rather than her face.
After having several paintings rejected by the Salon, Renoir's Lise with a Parasol was finally accepted and exhibited in May 1868. The painting was one of Renoir's first critically successful works during his early Salon period, an accomplishment which would only be surpassed more than a decade later with Madame Georges Charpentier and Her Children (1878) at the Salon of 1879. In the late 1860s, Renoir's technique was still influenced by Gustave Courbet, but he continued to develop his unique style painting filtered light which he would return to in The Swing (1876) and Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette (1876).
The almost life-size portrait and unusual contrast in Lise with a Parasol led several critics to ridicule the work. Théodore Duret, a passionate supporter of the nascent Impressionists, bought the painting from Renoir, who was unable to sell it. Karl Ernst Osthaus, a German patron of avant-garde art, acquired Lise with a Parasol in 1901 for the Museum Folkwang.
Background
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) grew up in Paris, where his father worked as a tailor and his mother as a seamstress.Distel 2010. Renoir trained as a porcelain painter for four years in his youth, but the Industrial Revolution was well underway and technological innovation in porcelain manufacturing replaced porcelain painters with machines, leaving Renoir without a career.Feist 1987, p. 8. He soon found work as a decorative commercial artist during the day, painting fans for ladies, church banners for overseas missionaries, and ornamental blinds. Renoir's early decorative and artisanal work gave him the ability to paint both with speed and skill.Lucy & House 2012, p. 1. In addition to this work, Renoir learned to draw in the evenings and spent his free time studying paintings at the Louvre.
In November 1860, he entered the private studio of Charles Gleyre (1806–1874) and was later admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts in April 1861.Tinterow 1994b, pp. 304–305. In Gleyre's studio, Renoir became friends with fellow students Claude Monet (1840–1926), Alfred Sisley (1839–1899), and Frédéric Bazille (1841–1870).Eitner 1992, p. 369. During the summer of 1862, Renoir and his friends painted landscapes in the Forest of Fontainebleau, following in the tradition of the Barbizon school before them. It was in the forest where Renoir first met Narcisse Virgilio Díaz (1807–1876), who, according to popular anecdote, saved Renoir from a vicious beating by using his cane to beat away attackers who were making fun of Renoir's porcelain smock.Vollard 1925, pp. 33–34. Renoir and Díaz had shared interests; they both got their start as decorators of porcelain before turning to painting. Díaz helped mentor Renoir, gave him access to art supplies, and influenced and changed his style, discouraging Renoir's overuse of bitumen and leading him to lighten his palette.Tinterow 1994b, pp. 306, 453; Vollard 1925, pp. 33–34. Art critic Jean Bouret writes: "Diaz, still wearing his old porcelain decorator's smock (like Troyon and Dupré), happened to meet Renoir in a clearing of the forest and recommended to him to use lighter tones, the very advice he himself had been given by Rousseau thirty years earlier. So a tradition was handed on, and henceforth, it would be the task of other 'sons of light' to bear the torch."Bouret 1973, p. 239.
In his research on collaboration and friendship dynamics among the French Impressionists, sociologist Michael P. Farrell notes that the group learned together from their shared successes and failures. The successful application of new knowledge about color Renoir acquired from Díaz was quickly shared with his friends. Sisley was resistant at first, thinking it was "crazy" to paint colored light ("The idea of making trees blue and the ground purple!") instead of the dark colors used in the classical style they were used to applying. But after playing around with the idea, Sisley soon embraced the new practice, and it was shared with Monet and Bazille. Renoir's exploratory use of color confirmed what Monet had previously learned from his mentor, Dutch painter Johan Jongkind (1819–1891), a forerunner of Impressionism. But with the success of these experiments also came failures, which were still influential. Monet's experiment with large format painting and his failure with Luncheon on the Grass (1865–1866) greatly influenced the close group of friends, with Monet's style helping to later inform Renoir's approach to Lise with a Parasol in 1867.Farrell 2001, pp. 35–36.
Renoir began submitting his work to the Salon in 1863. His first submission, Nymph and Faun, was rejected, leading Renoir to destroy his painting. The next year, Renoir tried again, submitting La Esméralda to the Salon of 1864. Despite its acceptance, Renoir once again destroyed his painting. Two of Renoir's works, Portrait de William Sisley (1864) and Soirée d'été, were accepted by the Salon of 1865.Duret 1910, pp. 160–169.Kingsley 1899, pp. 442–443. Of all of Renoir's four early Salon submissions between 1863 and 1866, only one work survives (Portrait de William Sisley).Patry 2022. Event occurs at 0:12:07.
In that same year, Renoir met Lise Tréhot through his friend, former architect and painter Jules Le Cœur, who was involved in a relationship with Clémence, Lise's sister. Jules was featured in two of Renoir's works in 1866, Mother Anthony's Tavern and Jules Le Cœur in Fontainebleau Forest. From around 1865 to 1872, Lise modeled for Renoir and was his lover and companion during his early Salon period. Meanwhile, Renoir continued to face rejection at the Salon with Paysage avec deux figures (1866) and Diana (1867), two works featuring Lise as a model.Distel 1995, pp. 21–24. Renoir's innovative work brought great ridicule and poverty, as he was unable to sell his paintings. He survived by devoting himself to painting portraits for wealthy patrons like the Le Cœur family. For about a decade, Renoir painted portraits and still lifes for the Le Cœurs and received a commission from Jules's brother Charles (Charles Le Cœur, 1874) to paint decorations on the ceiling for a town house he was designing for Romanian Prince George Bibescu.White 2017, pp. 37–38. Later, in 1874, the Le Cœurs ten year patronage came to an abrupt end when Renoir sent Charles's 16-year-old daughter Marie, (Portrait of Marie Le Cœur, 1870) a love letter, leading to Renoir's permanent ban from the Le Cœur residence.Cooper 1959b, p. 328. The Le Cœur family were the first collectors of Renoir's work and held on to his paintings until the 1920s.Distel 1990, pp. 11–16. Art historian Douglas Cooper notes, "Like Lise, the Le Coeurs had given moral support and encouragement to Renoir during those bleak years when he was struggling, in the face of poverty and frustration, to overcome the difficulties of allowing his artistic personality and vision to develop. And like Lise, too, they disappear out of Renoir's ambiance just at the moment when his style first attains to maturity and shortly before he was to experience his first worldly successes."
Development
Renoir sold himself as a figure painter during the early Salon period from 1863 to 1873, where he created large-scale works featuring figures in the outdoors, with only one landscape (Soirée d'été) submitted to the Salon during that entire time. Before the Impressionists held their first exhibitions in the 1870s, conventional academic art ranked landscape painting lower than history, portraiture, and genre painting.House 2007, pp. 10–11; Bailey 2007, p. 51-53. "Despite his attachment to Le Cœur and Marlotte, and to Monet and Sisley", writes art historian Colin B. Bailey, "landscape painting was a secondary endeavor for him."Bailey 2007, p. 53. Oddly enough, Renoir's refusal to identify himself as a landscapist to conform to the academic art demands of the day may have worked against his efforts to sell his paintings, as art dealers like Paul Durand-Ruel were looking to buy landscapes, not figure paintings.Bailey 2007, p. 54. Due to his financial difficulties and his parents' small apartment that had seven adults living in just three rooms, Renoir spent these early years living with his wealthy artist friends Frédéric Bazille (1841–1870), Le Cœur, Edmond Maître (1840–1898), and Sisley who also helped him find commissions. By July 1866, Renoir was living with Bazille at 20 rue Visconti on the Left Bank, and stayed there until December 1867.White 2017, pp. 64–67.
He began painting Lise with a Parasol in the summer of 1867, possibly in August, when he was 26 years old. Previously, it was assumed that Renoir had composed the painting in the Fontainebleau forest, close to Chailly-en-Brie near Bourron-Marlotte, just like he had done with Mother Anthony's Tavern (1866).Bouret 1973, pp. 208, 234, 239, 255. More recent scholarship points to Renoir painting the work in the Chantilly Forest of Chantilly, Oise, for two months, from July to August.Tinterow 1994b, p. 319. During this time, Maître sent a message to Bazille about how Renoir's technique had changed, writing on August 23, 1867, that although Renoir was now in Chantilly, Maître saw him in Paris earlier in the year where Renoir was "painting strange canvases, having traded turpentine for an infamous sulfate and using, instead of a knife, the little syringe that you know."Tinterow 1994a, p. 141. It is unknown if Renoir completed the painting of Lise with a Parasol in the studio or en plein air in the forest. "Even if Renoir largely worked on the painting in the studio", writes art historian Gary Tinterow, "we do not know enough about his practice in the 1860s". In spite of that, Renoir "presented his subjects as plein air painting".Tinterow 1994a, p. 140.
Exhibition
Renoir submitted the work to the Salon of 1868 with the short and simple title of "Lise". The painting was accepted by the Salon and received positive feedback.Roos 1996, p. 118–119. It was Renoir's first critically successful work at the Salon, only later surpassed with the greater success of Madame Georges Charpentier and Her Children (1878) at the Salon of 1879.Donahue 2013, p. 20. However, in spite of this achievement, "the jury had stigmatized Renoir as a rebel, along with Courbet, Manet, and Monet", according to Tinterow.Tinterow 2003, p. 516. The attention Renoir garnered with Lise led the administrators of the Salon to move Lise, along with paintings by Bazille and Monet, to a remote gallery known as the "rubbish dump" (dépotoir). When Renoir's work was exhibited by the Salon early in his career, it was often skied, a process where his paintings were deliberately hung in areas such as high places and corners where it was difficult for the public to view and would receive the least attention.Borgmeyer 1913, p. 146. Art historian Jane M. Roos notes that "relegating works to the dépotoir was a favorite tactic of the administration, a 'humiliation' in Castagnary's words and a sure sign that a painting had displeased the establishment or, perhaps, pleased the public too much."
Description