Portrait of a Man (Monsieur Charpentier)

The Charpentier family occupied a singular position in the social ecology of French Impressionism during the 1870s. Georges Charpentier was the publisher who had taken over his father's literary house and expanded it into one of the most culturally progressive imprints in Paris, publishing Flaubert, Zola, and Maupassant. His wife Marguerite ran one of the most important Parisian salons of the period, attended by politicians, writers, and artists, and she was among the earliest bourgeois patrons to collect Impressionist paintings seriously. Renoir's portrait of Georges himself — less celebrated than the famous Salon painting of Madame Charpentier and her children — shows the publisher in an informal moment that the artist could achieve precisely because the relationship between Renoir and the Charpentiers was one of genuine friendship rather than commercial obligation. This portrait was made in the same year that Madame Charpentier and Her Children was submitted to and accepted by the Salon, a success that owed something to the Charpentiers' social influence over the jury. The Barnes Foundation's holding of this more private version documents the personal side of an alliance that was commercially and socially important for Renoir's career throughout the late 1870s and 1880s.

Renoir places Charpentier in a three-quarter pose with a dark, neutral background that emphasizes the figure. The handling is confident and direct — Renoir's Impressionist brushwork softened slightly for a commissioned portrait's requirements. The palette is warm, with the face receiving the most careful attention while the suit is rendered more summarily.