GIRL COMBING HER HAIR

A Changing Style

Although Renoir was one of the founders of Impressionism, he had long since moved away from the movement when he painted Girl Combing Her Hair, and his style had changed a great deal over the intervening years. In the early 1880s he suffered a creative crisis, abandoning vivid colours and the undulating brushstrokes of the Impressionists. This began his so-called “harsh” or “dry” style, which characterised his works for the next ten years. In the 1890s, however, he rediscovered himself, returning to the vivid colours of the Impressionists, but this time turning towards a new finish inspired by the old masters Renoir held in high esteem. This final period of his art is often called his “pearly period” because of the soft, pearlescent colours and texture he used in his pictures, but also because the paintings of this period are suffused with a delicate light.

A Family Man

Tragically, it was also in the late 1890s that rheumatoid arthritis began to weaken him, an illness that accompanied him for the rest of his life. But many positive changes also took place in the artist’s life at this time. In 1890 Renoir married Aline Charigot — mother of his son Pierre — with whom he had long been in love; the couple had two more children: Jean (1894) and Claude (1901). The growing family increasingly occupied the artist’s time and energy, and he began painting portraits of his children in and around the house. In 1894, after the birth of the new family member, Jean, the Renoir family asked a distant cousin of Aline’s living in Essoyes to help in the household of the large family and take on the role of the children’s nanny. The girl was Gabrielle Renard (1878–1959), and in time she also filled another, increasingly important role: she became Renoir’s muse and model, and the artist made literally hundreds of paintings of her, including Girl Combing Her Hair.

Gabrielle Renard

Sixteen-year-old Gabrielle was almost still a child when she began looking after the Renoir children. As can be seen in intimate pictures such as Gabrielle and Jean (1895) or The Artist’s Family (1896), however, she soon became an indispensable member of the family and Renoir’s model. Although the title Girl Combing Her Hair gives no clue to the sitter’s identity, we know it is Gabrielle, not only because she also appears in a very similar picture, Gabrielle Holding a Mirror with a Portrait of Coco, but also because the girl’s long brown hair, rosy cheeks and full figure are easily recognisable. Renoir essentially painted few other models towards the end of his career. As his physical condition worsened, he concentrated more and more on subjects close to home, including his children, but above all Gabrielle.

In fact, for Renoir Gabrielle embodied female beauty itself with her sparkling youth and sensual figure, and the artist painted her more than two hundred times, even more than his own three children. The girl, for her part, learned her new role as Renoir’s muse without difficulty, and is always seen calm and at rest in the pictures, whether sitting for her own portrait, as in Girl Combing Her Hair, or as the figure in Dancer with Castanets (1909), or as one of Renoir’s sensual nudes, in Resting Nude, Gabrielle (1903).

Impressionist Parallels

Although Renoir did indeed move away from Impressionism in the early 1880s, his late figure studies, especially those of Gabrielle Renard, are somewhat reminiscent of the spontaneous snapshot quality of his earlier Impressionist painting. His works, such as Girl Combing Her Hair, present fleeting moments of intimacy, which he depicts as if the sitter were not a model at all, but rather a stranger blissfully unaware of the painter’s presence. For this reason such paintings are sometimes described as voyeuristic, but in many respects Renoir’s figure studies resemble the intimate pictures of dancers and bathers by his contemporary Edgar Degas, and are just as modern. Like Degas, Renoir painted the women of his time in their own surroundings, often absorbed in everyday activities. But whereas Degas explored more complex themes of movement and light, Renoir was occupied with much simpler things. All his life he wanted to paint only what he liked best: beauty — that of a landscape or, later, of a female figure.