Copy after the Painting by Rubens "The Council of Gods"

Copy after the Painting by Rubens 'The Council of Gods' of 1861 was made when Renoir was twenty years old and still a student at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, engaged in the fundamental academic training exercise of copying old master paintings in the Louvre. Rubens held particular significance for Renoir's developing sensibility: the Flemish master's monumental female nudes — warm, full-bodied, luminously painted — would remain his most consistent touchstone for the entire arc of his career. The Council of Gods was a ceiling painting from the Luxembourg Palace cycle that Rubens executed for Marie de Médicis, and copying a composition of such scale and complexity from this cycle was an ambitious undertaking for a student. Renoir's later comment — that he wished he could paint flesh the way Rubens did — suggests that this early copy was not merely academic exercise but the beginning of a lifelong investigation of warm flesh painting in the Flemish tradition. The Barnes Foundation's acquisition of this early copy was consistent with Albert Barnes's interest in documenting the full arc of Renoir's development, including the formative academic period that preceded his Impressionist breakthrough in the 1870s.

The young Renoir's copy reveals careful attention to Rubens's warm tonality and figure arrangement. The flesh tones already show the pinkish warmth that would become Renoir's signature. His brushwork is more careful and deliberate than his mature manner, following the original's layered academic finish.