Description
This painting may be Renoir's earliest signed canvas. Its sensitive display of color and light communicates an ideal of delicate, youthful beauty. The luminous tones of the background drapery and of the child's white blouse result from the artist's careful observation of reflected light and color on translucent materials. The delicate nuances of color, particularly in the young girl's face, reveal Renoir's previous training as a decorator of porcelain. He painted this portrait, commissioned by the vacationing Lacaux family, during his stay at an artist's colony in the village of Barbizon, near Paris.
Provenance
Lacaux family, Paris, France; Edmond Decap, Paris, France, by descent to Mme. Maruice Barret-Decap; Mme. Maurice Barret-Decap, Paris, France (-1929); (Drouot, Paris, France, December 12, 1929, lot 12, Barret-Decap Sale, sold to Roger Berheim) (1929-1941); (Roger Bernheim, Paris, France, sold to Jacques Seligmann & Co.,) (by 1941); (Jacques Seligmann & Co., New York, NY, December 2, 1941, sold to the Cleveland Museum of Art) (1941-1942); The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (1942-)
Accession Number
1942.1065
Medium
oil on fabric
Dimensions
Framed: 106.7 x 89.2 x 8.9 cm (42 x 35 1/8 x 3 1/2 in.); Unframed: 81.3 x 65 cm (32 x 25 9/16 in.)
Classification
Painting
Credit Line
Gift of the Hanna Fund
Tags
Color: Orange Color: Gray
Background & Context
Background Story
Pierre-Auguste Renoir's "Romaine Lacaux" (1864) is an early oil on fabric portrait that predates the artist's full involvement with Impressionism and shows him still working within the academic tradition. The sitter, Romaine Lacaux, was the daughter of Renoir's early patrons, the Lacaux family of potters in Limoges, Renoir's birthplace. At twenty-three, Renoir was still finding his way as an artist—he had studied at the École des Beaux-Arts under Charles Gleyre, where he met Monet, Sisley, and Bazille, the future founders of Impressionism. This portrait shows a serious young girl in a white dress, posed against a dark background. The handling is more tightly finished than Renoir's later work, with careful attention to the details of the dress, the ribbons, and the child's features. But the seeds of Renoir's mature style are already visible: the soft modeling of the face, the warm flesh tones, and the sensitivity to the individual character of the sitter. This painting is one of Renoir's earliest surviving portraits and documents the moment before he abandoned academic finish for the broken color and bright palette of Impressionism.
Cultural Impact
"Romaine Lacaux" is a crucial early work that shows Renoir before Impressionism, providing a baseline against which to measure the revolutionary changes that would transform his style in the following decade.
Why It Matters
This early portrait reveals the solid academic foundation on which Renoir built his revolutionary Impressionist style—the draftsmanship, the sensitivity to character, and the love of paint that would define his entire career were already present in this quiet portrait of a young girl.
