What Do You See? The Collection of Sidney Rothberg, Part I

The present Lot will be included in the forthcoming Digital Catalogue Raisonné of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s work, currently being prepared under the sponsorship of the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, Inc. It will also come accompanied with a Certificate of Authenticity dated December 15, 2023. An article in the newspaper La France from December 1884 dubbed Renoir an “exquisite artist,” and emphasized his natural talent as a portraitist, concluding: “In the same way that Watteau somewhat created the grace of the eighteenth- century woman, Renoir has created the grace of the nineteenth century woman.” Senator Étienne Goujon (1839-1907) seemingly agreed with this sentiment when he commissioned Renoir to paint a portrait of each of his four children.The portraits of the Goujon children fit within the series of ‘society portraits’ that Renoir had started since 1878, and which provided him with both financial stability and a growing reputation among the classe mondaine. Considered “Renoir’s last hurrah as a portraitist mondain” by Colin Bailey, these four portraits do not constitute a uniform group, nevertheless. Evidently executed at different times, they can be grouped in two pairs. First are the portraits of Goujon’s two elder sons, Pierre Jean Léon and Pierre Étienne Henri, which, in the same format, show the brothers wearing the same fashionable sailor suit–a British fashion trend often seen in the children of the upper middle class (Renoir painted other boys dressed as little sailors). The second pair of portraits, much larger in size, depict the Senator’s younger children, Étienne and Marie Goujon, dressed identically in the family garden. Each is identified by a toy–a whip and a hoop, respectively–two known symbols of well-to-do families in France’s Third Republic regime.The Portrait of Pierre Goujon dates from a pivotal moment in Renoir’s career, a professional crossroads where the artist was attempting to break the Impressionist mold and find a new aesthetic. Renoir grew discontented with Impressionism as early as 1879, when it became clear that cooperative exhibitions did not bring much success. Eager to go beyond the free-floating touch to make grander and more careful pictorial statements, Renoir sought an alternative. As he expressed to his friend and dealer Ambroise Vollard: “I had wrung Impressionism dry, and I finally came to the conclusion that I knew neither how to paint nor draw.” The Portrait of Pierre Goujon thus symbolizes a new path to making a painting.With its long, broad strokes of paint, precise contouring, and apparent simplicity, the Portrait of Pierre Goujon eschews the spontaneity and transience traditionally associated with Impressionism (which is on full display in the portraits of Étienne and Marie Goujon). Here, Renoir introduces a new, classicizing conception of the figure. He has distinctly placed the young boy against a broadly brushed, English green background, which demarcates the figure even more, making it a solid, almost statuesque, shape. “Painted with the concentration of enamel,” according to Colin Bailey, the portrait announces Renoir’s so-called Ingresque period, during which the artist sought inspiration from the past, privileging design over color. Jean-Dominique Ingres and Renaissance artists became direct points of reference for Renoir, who confessed to be mesmerized by “the grandeur and simplicity of the ancient painters” following a sojourn in Italy in the early 1880s. With his face delicate as ivory and his almond-shaped eyes carefully drawn, little Pierre appears directly taken from a different country, another century.To this point, the portrait radically differs from that of Étienne and Marie Goujon, which belong to what Anne Distel calls "the safe type," characterized by a lush, wet, and colorful impasto that conveys a unique, warm luminosity filling up the canvas and the viewer. Here, the Portrait of Pierre Goujon is almost more of a cerebral, intellectual exercise as it painstakingly illustrates Renoir’s newfound quest to steer away from an easy art, to rekindle a more classicist vein, hereby opening a new chapter in the artist’s œuvre which arguably intrigued and often irritated his contemporaries.Little is known about Renoir’s relationship with Étienne Goujon and the genesis of this quadruple commission. The Senator could have been introduced to the artist via several mutual acquaintances, such as Antonin Proust (Minister of Fine Art in Gambetta’s cabinet), Paul Bérard or, what is more likely, Paul Paulin, a lifelong friend of Goujon’s who approached all the Impressionists to commission a series of fans for his fiancée in 1885.Born on April 28, 1839 in a small town on the outskirts of Macon, Étienne Goujon, Sr., studied medicine in Paris, and became a certified doctor in 1866. He made a name for himself during the outbreak of cholera in the Nièvre, which prompted him to run an asylum on rue Picpus in Paris. He was elected Senator for the Ain in 1885, the year the present work was executed. A strong Republican, he worked in the French Senate until his death in 1907.While this important commission made of Goujon a seemingly important patron of Modern Art, it was mostly his son, our sitter, Pierre Goujon, who made a name for himself as a strong collector with an expert eye, bequeathing Vincent van Gogh’s La Guingette and Toulouse Lautrec’s La Toilette to the Musée du Louvre in 1914. Following into his father’s footsteps, Pierre became a Deputy in 1910. Enrolling in the French Army, he died in combat on August 1914, becoming the first ever member of French Parliament to die in WWI.