La loge

The Box, or La Loge, is an oil on canvas that Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted in 1874, now held by the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. It shows a moment of nightlife in nineteenth-century Paris: a young woman in the foreground, dressed in a striking gown of bold black and white stripes and adorned with pearls and pink roses, looks directly out at the viewer and draws us into the scene. Behind her, her companion, Renoir's brother Edmond, ignores the performance and scans the audience through his opera glasses, looking for a familiar face. This reflects a habit of the period: at the theatre, the middle classes went as much to be seen and to socialise as to follow the play.

The model is Nini Lopez, known as Gueule de Raie, a friend who sat for Renoir many times. The theatre box was a subject that interested several of the Impressionists, including Degas, Mary Cassatt and Eva Gonzalès, although earlier it had appeared mainly in caricatures and fashion illustrations. Here Renoir did not pursue the experimental handling of light he was developing alongside Monet at La Grenouillère. Instead, he used black freely, a colour that Impressionist theory regarded with suspicion, in Edmond's tailcoat, the binoculars and the stripes of the dress. The strong light on the woman's face and skin stands against the partly shadowed figure of the man.

Despite its beauty, the painting failed to find a buyer when it was shown. Renoir eventually offered it to his dealer, known as Père Martin, for 425 francs, the exact sum he needed to pay his overdue rent. Over time the work has come to be seen as the first of a long series of Renoir portraits with an unmistakable charm.

Painter

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Date

1874

Medium

oil paint, canvas

Dimensions

80 × 64 cm

Museum

Courtauld Institute of Art, London

Genre

painting

Depicts

theatre

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