Madame Léon Clapisson

Madame Léon Clapisson, painted in 1883, was one of Renoir's most formally ambitious portrait commissions of his Dry Period, when he was deliberately moving away from the loose Impressionist handling of the 1870s toward harder, more considered drawing. The sitter, wife of a successful businessman, is set in a garden, her formal dress providing a strong chromatic event within the outdoor setting. Renoir reportedly worked on the painting with unusual deliberateness, regretting the looser fluency of his earlier manner and attempting to replace it with something more architecturally composed — only to return, by the late 1880s, to warmth and spontaneity.

The formal garden setting and the sitter's elaborate dress are handled with more precision than Renoir typically brought to outdoor figures in this period, the careful treatment of her black-and-white outfit reflecting the demands of a paying commission. The face is modelled with his standard warm flesh approach, but within a compositional structure more conscious of spatial organisation than his informal studies.