10 Key Works from “Renoir Drawings” at the Morgan Library & Museum

This pastel drawing is one of the great joys of the show, and we’re very lucky we were able to borrow it [from the Albertina in Vienna]. Pastel for Renoir is between drawing and painting; the colors are very vibrant, but the handling is as a drawing.

Elisabeth Maître was a young girl, born in Peru, who comes to live in Paris with her family. She’s the niece of one of Renoir’s great early supporters. During this period Renoir is a successful portrait painter of the wives and daughters of relatively well-to-do bourgeoisie. They might not choose him to do their portrait, but they’d allow him to paint their family members.

The young woman remembered much later on in life Renoir coming to paint her portrait over three sessions. So it was quite quick. When you see this drawing in person, the modeling of the face—the sweetness and innocence of this girl—is very compelling.

This is a fascinating drawing. We were able to date it specifically to 1880 because of a letter written in January or February 1881 by the former secretary of the man who owned it. The secretary in Berlin wrote to the owner in Paris that he remembers the pretty drawing of the woman with a snow background. It sounds sort of banal, but many of these works are not formally dated. This drawing had been dated around 1880 to 1883, but because of the reference in the secretary’s letter, we know it would have been done in 1880. These are the little things—well, not so little!—that we are happy to make certain.

If you look very closely you’ll see on her face the indication of a veil. Women at that point, when they walked the streets of Paris, there was so much dust and dirt that they would have a little veil covering their face. He makes this aureole of white chalk around the work to give it a finished, complete status.

The drawing is incredibly meticulous. It’s very fine, very detailed, but it’s not illustrative. It shows that he’s capable of drawings in a very fine manor. It’s still relatively free, which you can see in the folds of the skirt. You have a feeling of this wintry costume and that she’s walking outdoors, even though there’s nothing in the drawing itself to tell you where she’s walking.

This is a very beautiful large chalk drawing, quite a late addition as we were preparing for the exhibition. We went to see it at a private gallery in Paris and were absolutely floored by how rigorous it is. Because it’s so large, it would seem to be preparatory for a painting. And there is a painting of young lovers in a garden, and the woman is very happy to be courted by this man. This is not the case in this drawing; there is a pulsating almost-aggression in the man. He’s holding her hand, he’s ardent, but she doesn’t seem entirely sure.

In the painting, they’re outdoors, but here, that’s not Renoir’s interest. He’s really just capturing the body as it was. It’s a drawing about body language.

These drawings are from one of the main pods in the show. The one with blue and black wash, chalk, and graphite—it’s really a multi-media work—really gives you a sense of the movement of the dancers. And then there’s this wonderful group of disembodied heads on the page. He’s really thinking in wash, and he’s not thinking about making a work that will be for sale.

The show also includes two related drawings that were done after the painting was completed, because they are going to be reproduced in an art journal called La Vie Moderne. It’s interesting to see the first of these efforts [above right], in pen and ink and brush, where you can even see the marks of the brush on the borders of the paper. He’s really thinking about how to make this in black and white. He does it a second time, but more calmly, without the same energy, but with slightly more detail, because it will then be made into a photographic plate and reproduced in a magazine.

The drawing on the right is, in a way, the heart of the show. It’s an immediate reference to one of Renoir’s most famous paintings [in the Musée d’Orsay’s collection] and his most characteristic interests.

This drawing, in a way, launched the show. We were given this amazing large drawing for The Great Bathers as a gift from the estate of Drue Heinz, a former trustee, in 2018. It was only known from a small illustration in Renoir’s catalogue raisonné, and had never been exhibited.

I first saw the drawing about 20 years ago. At the time I was working at the Frick Collection, and I was at a dinner at Drue Heinz’s house. I saw the drawing in her hallway and was blown over by it. I’d seen drawings like it at the Musée d’Orsay, but I simply didn’t know this one existed, and it was in fantastic condition. After she died, one of her bequests was for a work from her collection to go to the Morgan. I said, that’s marvelous! Is the Renoir drawing on the table, because if so, it would be absolutely perfect for the Morgan. We have a handful of very nice drawings by Renoir, but nothing like this.

Renoir worked on The Great Bathers [in the Philadelphia Museum of Art collection] for at least a year and a half. He made several drawings in relation to it. We were able to bring together many of the small preparatory drawings, along with the large chalk drawings that are almost like Renaissance-style cartoons. These really give you a sense of how he prepares, how he plans, how he changes, and how he creates his compositions.

This drawing from the Art Institute of Chicago is absolutely fantastic. The modeling of the flesh is so beautifully controlled and worked on. And again, she has that white snowy background [as in Young Woman with a Muff, above]. She’s cupping her hands as if she’s about to splash water, which is not exactly the same gesture she has in the painting. This one is so unlike the other preparatory drawings in the show; it is so much more finished and pondered and seamless. I think it’s one of Renoir’s true masterpieces.

I did an exhibition on Renoir’s Impressionist landscapes, and for those paintings he didn’t make sections or watercolors—he just went straight onto the canvas. In the 1880s and ‘90s he’s doing the same with drawings. These are not preparations for paintings. This one [and the following] are among his most ambitious landscape watercolors.

Renoir talked to his dealer about his watercolors. They were done on site, and he referred to them as “material,” or “material for his study.” When he came back from the country to work in his studio, these watercolors were a way of leading his imagination or just remembering a motif. But they were not done with a particular composition in mind.

If you look closely at this watercolor, it has an inscription. It was given as a gift to a woman named Madame Clapisson. She was the wife of a well-to-do patron of Renoir’s, who had commissioned Renoir to paint his wife’s portrait. Renoir obviously liked her, but I’m not sure he liked the husband as much; he didn’t like the first portrait composition, so Renoir had to do another one. Having said that, this watercolor is Renoir’s gesture of friendship to Madame Clapisson.

This is a truly wonderful preparatory drawing for a fantastic painting in the Orangerie, which is in our exhibition. It’s very close to the painting, but not exactly the same. Jean was Renoir’s second son, and Gabrielle was their devoted housekeeper. Renoir does several iterations of this grouping in different moments. The exhibition has four or five examples, and we can see how this motif changes in different media. It’s so affectionate and captures the little boy’s concentration on his toys and his excitement at playing with them. And we see how gentle Gabrielle is, so focused on keeping him happy.

It was fascinating to be able to bring together a group of late red-and-white chalk drawings that relate not only to an oil painting but to a sculpture—a plaster relief Renoir did in 1914 called The Judgement of Paris. It shows the young shepherd Paris, who has to decide which of the three goddesses is the most beautiful. It’s part of Renoir’s late Arcadian return to the nude. The Judgment of Paris is a topic that Renoir painted, sculpted, and drew, with no boundaries between the different mediums, which is something we wanted to indicate at the end of our show.