Renoir

A Special Loan: Renoir’s Madame Henriot

May 24, 2016 – September 11, 2016

Organized by the Arkansas Arts Center

The lovely French actress of the late nineteenth century known as Madame Henriot will be appearing at the Arkansas Arts Center this summer, in a painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. This magnificent full-length portrait of the actress in costume for a “breeches” role comes to Arkansas from the Columbus Museum of Art in Columbus, Ohio, in exchange for the Arkansas Arts Center’s lending its 1914 Cubist master work by Diego Rivera, Dos Mujeres, to the Columbus Museum for its exhibition Picasso and the Great War.

Renoir and his friend Claude Monet were leaders of the nineteenth-century French movement known as Impressionism. Impressionist artists used rapidly applied dabs of pure color to capture how they saw forms in light. In the 1870s, when Renoir made this portrait, the Impressionists were still considered dangerous artistic radicals who valued effects of colors above the traditionally admired academic rules for drawing, composition, and subject matter.

Renoir made many magnificent full-length portraits like this one, often entering them in the grand annual national French Salons. Previous artists had reserved this impressive mode of portraiture for royalty and other wealthy people with the funds to commission such large works. Renoir and his fellow Impressionists, however, enjoyed making portraits of all kinds of people. Actors and actresses were considered particularly daring subjects for portraits.

Madame Henriot was the stage name used by Henriette Marie Alphonsine Grossin (1857 – 1944), who began studying acting at the Conservatoire de Musique et de Déclamation in Paris in 1872. Soon afterwards, the young actress began to appear in minor theatrical parts. Many of the plays did badly. She was probably glad of the income from posing for Renoir. In the 1880s and 1890s, Madame Henriot became very successful appearing in light comedies. She posed for Renoir only once more, as a grey-haired lady.

In Madame Henriot in Costume, the actress is seen standing off stage in the one of the Paris theaters where she appeared. She is dressed for a “breeches,” part, in which a young woman appears as a boy. It is uncertain exactly which such role Renoir portrays here. It may be the page in the opera Les Huguenots, in which the actress never actually appeared. In the late nineteenth century, when women normally appeared in voluminous skirts, it was considered particularly sensual for a young woman to appear on stage in close-clinging tights and a doublet which revealed her legs.

Renoir became close friends with Madame Henriot. The actress’s daughter, Jeanne Angèle (1878 – 1900), posed for the Impressionist as a child. Later, under the stage name of Jane Henriot, she was a successful actress in Paris. Jane was killed in a tragic theater fire in 1900, when she was only 22 years old. Ironically, this lovely painting of Jane’s mother survived a fire in the early 1940s.