Motherhood Orsay

Aline Charigot’s and Renoir’s first son, Pierre, was born in March 1885, and that summer the new family rented a house in the village of La Roche-Guyon, sixty kilometers northwest of Paris. With Aline and Pierre posed in front of the rustic stone house, the artist made numerous studies of the nursing mother and child, many of them in red and white chalk, a medium well suited to capturing the rosy skin tones of the sitters and the warm, intimate nature of their interaction. Some of these preparatory drawings, like the one nearby, were executed on paper that was essentially the same size as the planned canvas, which simplified the process of translating the composition from drawing to painting. For the canvas, Renoir used thin layers of diluted oil paint over a smooth white ground layer, giving the work a dry, almost matte finish and leaving some preliminary pencil lines still visible under the surface. When his friend and fellow artist Berthe Morisot visited his studio in January 1886, it was a group of preparatory drawings for this composition that she especially noticed: “On an easel was a drawing in red and white chalk of a young mother nursing her child,” Morisot wrote in her journal, “charming in its grace and finesse. Since I admired it, he showed me a series done from the same model in about the same pose. Renoir is a draftsman of the first order,” she concluded.