In the Summer

Painted in 1868, In the Summer shows Lise Tréhot, a young woman of about twenty who was Renoir's companion and one of his most frequent models in these years; he painted her at least twenty-three times. The composition is simple: a half-length frontal figure seated beside a wall, possibly on a balcony, with foliage behind her. The figure is carefully finished, so the face and hands look smooth and almost photographic, while the background is built from broad, quick strokes and dashes of colour that suggest sunlit leaves. This contrast between the precise and the sketched is one of the picture's most interesting features, and it points towards the way Renoir would work in the years that followed.

The dress is light and informal: a white bodice whose right strap has slipped off the shoulder, leaving a deep neckline, and a skirt with red and white stripes. A few green leaves in her right hand and a thin red band holding back her loose hair reinforce the sense of a summer day. Her gaze, directed off to one side, gives her a somewhat distant air. The type of the young woman with dark, loose hair and a gypsy-like look draws on Romantic tradition and recalls Esmeralda from Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris, a figure that painters of the period often turned to.

The painting was shown at the Paris Salon of 1869 under the title En été, étude. The word 'étude' was added, probably to soften criticism of a background less finished than a conventional salon picture was expected to be. The label reflects the tension of the time between studio painting and a looser manner. Théodore Duret saw it as one of Renoir's first steps towards open-air painting, and today it is often regarded as a link between Courbet's realism, Delacroix's Romantic inheritance and Impressionism. The work is held by the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin.

Painter

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Date

1868

Medium

oil paint, canvas

Dimensions

85 × 59 cm

Museum

Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin

Movement

bohemianism, French Realism, Romantic painting, Impressionism

Genre

portrait

Depicts

sitting, décolletage, summer, waist-length hair, chair, Lise Tréhot, earring, dark brown

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