Deux femmes dans le jardin de Cagnes, vers 1918
Oil on canvas, signed lower left.
54.90 x 64.80 cm
Provenance :
Drouot sale, Paris, June 23, 1933, lot 75
Versailles sale, November 22, 1964, lot 67
Christie's London sale, December 6, 1977, lot 14
Private collection, Switzerland
Daniel B. Grossman, New-York
Collection Joan B. Kroc, 1991
Christie's sale Estate of Joan B. Kroc, May 2, 2006, lot 9
Private collection, Switzerland
Exhibitions :
French paintings and sculptures, O'Hana Gallery, London, June-September 1964, no. 55.
Bibliography:
L'atelier de Renoir, vol. 2, Editions Bernheim Jeune, Paris, 1931, no. 607 (ill. pl. 190)
IN THE GARDEN OF LIFE
In the garden of life, youth sparkles in a pink dress. It's Andrée, under her flowery straw hat, young and beautiful forever in the midst of the flower beds. The sap of the painter's old age is her white flesh, her red hair, her finch-like cheerfulness and the hours spent drawing her body. The other woman is probably Madeleine Bruno, a young villager who also posed also posed for the painter at this time.
Even though he was ill and confined to an armchair, Renoir never gave up his brushes. He suffered from excruciating rheumatism and his hands were bandaged.
but he was still hungry for color and life, for flesh and beauty. As long as you paint, you're alive.
Of his pain as a man, lush gardens and pink dresses say nothing. Perhaps they knew nothing? Or have these paradises kept it to themselves, buried beneath the palms, the branches, hidden in the tuff, this human suffering that is only fleeting while they live eternally, these pieces of light caught in the web.
You'd never say that he's going to die soon, that this is one of his last summers, that his eyes will close on the bodies of the Bathers, on Andrée's softness.
All these transparencies, these tops and bottoms of stretched colors, melted in the light of a perpetual summer, build the hiding place of a captured happiness.
For what pleases the eye brightens the heart, and for Renoir, there's nothing like the spectacle of nature, as soon as it's provided with flowers and women. In this garden, where Andrée sits wisely, the sensuality that, Renoir's paintbrushes. Fruit you can eat, flesh you desire, flowers you can breathe.
Renoir had many female models: Lise, Aline, Gabrielle, Nini... Andrée was the last. In 1921, she married his son Jean, who made her an actress.
Despite his illness, the painter worked until the end of his strength, and the young woman often shared these hours with him. “Andrée was one of the living elements that helped Renoir fix on canvas the prodigious cry of love at the end of his life”. Jean wrote in his published memoirs.
Les Baigneuses of 1919, the artist's testament painting, is an ode to the sensuality of her body. The last flower in her garden, Andrée's fiery cheeks flutter eternally under the trees of Les Collettes, in the precious summer.