Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Le Chapeau épinglé, 2e planche
Circa 1898
Colour lithograph on laid paper with watermark "MBM" 61.5 x 49.5 cm (75 x 59.2 cm) Framed under glass. Signed 'Renoir' within the stone lower right, stamped signature 'Renoir' below the depiction on the left. - The paper minimally browned.
The magnificent, large-format colour lithograph “Le chapeau épinglé” is among Renoir's most outstanding prints. It has an exceptionally painterly effect: the soft, gentle tonality and freshness of Renoir's paintings have been expertly transposed into the medium of the printing technique - a masterful achievement by the artist and his printer, Auguste Clot. The total edition of the colour lithograph consisted of 200 impressions in different chromatic variations. Only a part of these, including the present example, were realised with the greatest number of colours. The total of 11 tones makes a rich scale of nuances and modulations possible.
The sheet's motif is also very typical of Renoir's oeuvre: in this charming anecdotal scene, a girl - Berthe Morisot's daughter - is sticking flowers into the summer hat of her cousin. Although carefully composed by the artist, the scene seems as though it were captured spontaneously. The young girl in the foreground appears only in lost profile; in addition, her face and shoulders are further covered by her white hat and long, black hair. As a delicate apparition in a white dress, her cousin with the flowered hat is shifted somewhat into the picture's background. As the work's title already suggests, the hat decorated in splendid colours really is the focus of the composition. It immediately attracts the viewer's gaze: the colour of the print is concentrated there.
The famous art dealer and publisher Ambroise Vollard, who published the edition of “Le chapeau épinglé”, even mentions the work in his memoirs: “I've always very particularly loved prints, and hardly had I set myself up in the Rue Laffitte, when I began harbouring the wish to publish a work with prints, but only with pieces by living painters. […] On my initiative Bonnard, Cézanne, Maurice Denis, Redon, Renoir, Sisley, Toulouse-Lautrec and Vuillard created the beautiful sheets, which are still so sought-after today, as an experiment. […] Renoir, who always displayed the greatest goodwill towards me, also created a number of lithographs for me, including the well-known sheet 'Chapeau épinglé', which he carried out in black and in colour, using ink for the one plate and pencil for the other.” (cited from: Ambroise Vollard, Erinnerungen eines Kunsthändlers, Zurich 1980, pp. 263 f.).
Catalogue Raisonné
Stella 30; Delteil 30
Provenance
Galerie Aktuaryus, Zurich (label verso); formerly private collection, North Rhine-Westphalia; in family possession since