Portrait de Madame Josse Bernheim-Dauberville

Portrait de Madame Josse Bernheim-Dauberville (1901) depicts Mathilde Adler, wife of Josse Bernheim-Dauberville, a partner in the Bernheim-Jeune gallery — one of the most important commercial art galleries of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist era. Renoir maintained a long relationship with the Bernheim-Jeune gallery, which handled his sales and organised his exhibitions. Painting the wives and family members of his dealers was both a social courtesy and a form of payment in kind. Mathilde appears as an embodiment of Renoir's vision of bourgeois feminine dignity, painted with the warmth and flattery he reliably brought to his commissioned portraits of women.

Portrait commissions required Renoir to achieve a likeness while maintaining his characteristic painterly warmth — a balance he managed by anchoring the face's specific features within a broadly handled atmospheric treatment of costume and background. The sitter's fashionable Parisian dress provided an opportunity for rich textile description.