Studies of Pierre Renoir; His Mother, Aline Charigot; Nudes; and Landscape

Studies of Pierre Renoir, his Mother, Aline Charigot, Nudes, and Landscape at the Art Institute of Chicago is one of Renoir's most remarkable works precisely because it refuses to be a single thing. The composite study canvas, in which different subjects are worked out on the same ground, was a common working practice among nineteenth-century painters — Delacroix filled similar canvases, and academic training explicitly encouraged composite study sheets — but its survival as a finished object reveals the material reality of Renoir's practice in a way that his exhibition paintings deliberately conceal. Pierre was born in March 1885 and immediately became a subject of intense paternal observation. Aline, pregnant and then nursing, was simultaneously his companion, his primary domestic model, and the centre of a new domestic order that the arrival of the child had established. The year 1885 was among the most personally significant of his life, and this multi-study canvas documents its domestic richness with characteristic unselfconsciousness. The Art Institute's significant Renoir collection places this intimate working document alongside the finished canvases it helped produce, illuminating the relationship between process and achievement.

The canvas is organized into distinct zones of study, each handled with characteristic Renoir softness — warm flesh tones, dappled light effects, and fluid brushwork that captures the roundness of the infant's face and the suppleness of the reclining figure.