A child’s portrait by French impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir, once owned by art dealer Ambroise Vollard, will go on sale at Paris auction house Aguttes on April 20 with an estimate of 450,000-650 000 €.
child sitting on a chair (1895), which Vollard sold to the father of the consignees in 1930, has never been exhibited publicly, although the painting is neither lost nor entirely unknown. It is mentioned in the Vollard catalog of 1918 Paintings, Pastels & Drawings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. “We thought it might be smaller,” explains Pierre-Alban Vinquant, head of the impressionist and modern department at Aguttes. “We expected a format of 10 cm by 15 cm, in line with the works that have recently found their way into our hands, but which is actually 40 cm by 27 cm. Neither big nor small. »
Renoir is the only impressionist artist to have used the portrait as a source of income. Patrons and bankers, among other clients, commissioned him to immortalize their wives and children, knowing that they would have no say in the matter. “This is how many portraits became works of Renoir above all and sometimes to the detriment of their models”, wrote specialist and curator Anne Distel in 1993. Some of the first works he sent to the Paris Salon in 1865 are portraits, including that of landscape painter Alfred Sisley’s father, William Sisley.
By the 1890s Renoir had become well established and was free to choose his own subjects, including his sons Pierre (b. 1885), Jean (b. 1894) and especially Claude, alias Coco (b. 1901). His family portraits or genre paintings including children and their parents, such as Madame Charpentier and her children (1878) are celebrations of youth.
As for the identity of the model of the Aguttes painting, little is known. “We don’t know if the painting depicts a boy or a girl – he or she may have long hair and it is not enough to determine a gender. But we don’t think they are the pure figment of Renoir’s imagination,” says Vinquant.
