Portrait of Misia Sert

Misia Godebska — later Misia Natanson, Misia Edwards, and finally Misia Sert — was among the most culturally important figures in Paris at the turn of the twentieth century. The daughter of a Polish sculptor, she became the wife of Thadée Natanson, co-founder of the Revue Blanche, the literary and artistic journal that published Mallarmé, Verlaine, and Jarry while championing the Nabis painters — Bonnard, Vuillard, Toulouse-Lautrec. Toulouse-Lautrec painted Misia on the river with obsessive attention; Bonnard and Vuillard included her in their intimate domestic scenes; Renoir's 1904 portrait at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art confronts her at thirty-two with the full authority of a senior master. The portrait captures the social pivot between eras: Misia belonged fully to the Revue Blanche world of the 1890s Symbolist avant-garde while also being present at the birth of the Ballets Russes, where she would become Diaghilev's closest confidante. Renoir's warm, sensuous rendering of her presence domesticates the social power that Toulouse-Lautrec's more astringent observation had made palpable, but the specific physiognomy and alert intelligence of the sitter resist any reduction to mere decorative warmth.

Renoir brings to the portrait of Misia his full command of feminine presence in paint — the characteristic warmth of flesh tone, the rich treatment of hair, the fashionable costume handled with fluid brushwork. Unlike his idealised anonymous bathers, Misia's likeness required individual specificity, and Renoir accommodates both physiognomic particularity and overall pictorial warmth.