Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted children throughout his long career. Not only did he portray the sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie who commissioned their own society portraits (M.68.46.1), he turned often to his own family for inspiration. At the time Renoir executed this painting in 1888, he was well on his way to financial and critical success. He had joined the Impressionists and participated in their first three exhibitions (1874, 1876, and 1877), but by the late 1870s he had returned to a less investigative approach that was likely drawn from his success as a fashionable portraitist. A trip to Italy in 1881 reaffirmed his engagement with the old masters, especially Raphael, and proved transformative in redefining his method of lighting: rather than illuminating a scene, he recognized how light could emanate from within it. Such is the case in this intimate image of his three-year-old son Pierre drawing, where light seems to radiate from the boy himself onto the object of his intense focus.
Renoir aligned himself with a tradition of child portraiture stretching back to eighteenth-century France. His paintings of children absorbed in private tasks reflect the thoughtful quiet of Chardin’s works (M.79.251) and, slightly later, those of Jean-Baptiste Greuze. For both, youth projected innocence and purity, qualities that Renoir saw gradually disappearing in the wake of the social and political turmoil of modern Parisian life. It was, in part, his refusal to address these challenges in favor of depicting only the palatable aspects of bourgeois life that affected his reputation in the history of modern painting. Even Degas complained about it, wishing for more from his friend and exclaiming, “Let him do no more portraits, let him remain a landscape painter!”
2024
