Listen to director and curator Colin Bailey discuss Renoir’s depictions of Parisian shop assistants
In the 1870s and early 1880s, Renoir regularly depicted scenes of urban life in Paris, here showing a woman carrying a hatbox, standing in front of the shop where she presumably worked as an assistant. The pastel is a more detailed rendering of the subject of a young woman in the street; similar figures appear in related drawings on view nearby, which may have been preliminary ideas for larger compositions.
The Milliner, ca. 1879
Pastel
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Lesley and Emma Sheafer Collection, Bequest of Emma A. Sheafer, 1973, 1974.356.34.
Renoir was one of the earliest contributors to a new literary and artistic journal called La Vie moderne that was first published in April 1879. At about this time, he began to draw images of women who worked in dressmakers’ or millinery shops, easily identifiable by the large boxes in which they carried their wares as they made their way through the streets. Although he proposed to illustrate a section for the magazine dedicated to the fashions of the week, he didn’t develop the idea further. This may explain why one drawing on view nearby, which is made on the kind of special prepared paper that Renoir initially had to use for his drawings to be reproduced in the journal, was never published. He still continued to treat the subject of shop assistants and their clients both in small pencil sketches and in this more fully worked-up pastel, as well as in a later, large-scale painting. The woman in this pastel presumably works for the milliner’s shop she is about to enter, and, although it is not clearly defined, Renoir seems to have adjusted the box she is carrying from a rectangular format to a round one, suitable for holding one of the elaborate hats visible in the window behind her. In depicting tradespeople and fashionable figures going about their daily lives in the streets of Paris, Renoir joined a number of other artists, both fellow Impressionists and more conservative painters, who drew inspiration from the bustling urban environment and the wide variety of people it brought together.