Le jeune homme à l'œillet

Le Jeune Homme à l'oeillet (The Young Man with a Carnation, 1900), at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, presents a male subject holding a carnation — a flower with strong association with love, admiration, and gift-giving in late nineteenth-century European culture. Male portrait subjects were less frequent in Renoir's oeuvre than female ones, and this young man with his boutonnière flower represents a more formal mode of portraiture than his informal studies of women and children. The Norton Museum holds a significant collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist work in an institution dedicated to placing major European modernism in an American context.

Renoir's handling of a young male subject differs subtly from his female portraiture: he applies his warm flesh-tone technique while maintaining a slightly more structured approach to facial modelling appropriate to masculine physiognomy. The carnation's red provides a vivid chromatic accent in what is otherwise a relatively restrained tonal range.