Girl with a Fan by Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Pierre-Auguste Renoir · 1885-01-01

This is 'Girl with a Fan,' painted by Pierre-Auguste Renoir around 1885. The sitter is Marie-Clémentine Valadon, known as Suzanne Valadon, a seamstress from Montmartre who would become a significant painter herself, the first woman admitted to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts.

The fan is the painting's great gesture, open, radiant, held before her body. It both reveals and screens, a tool of self-presentation Renoir returns to again and again. Her eyes anchor the composition: painted with more definition than the loose brushwork around them, they hold you still.

Valadon modeled for Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Degas before picking up the brush herself. Renoir called her his 'petit soleil.' She learned by watching them, then made her own way. He painted her face perhaps twenty times. This one survives as a record of a young woman on the cusp of her own artistic life.

She lived only to thirty-four. The gaze she gives us here, steady, knowing, carries a weight the fan cannot hide.

Details

A seamstress from Montmartre, lifting herself from the streets.

She holds the fan like a woman who has learned to own a room.

He called her his 'petit soleil', his little sun.

Look at the sleeve. The paint itself becomes the light.

She died at thirty-four. Ten years after this quiet afternoon.

Transcript

She was sixteen when artists began painting her face. A seamstress from Montmartre, lifting herself from the streets. Renoir painted her twenty times. His brush knew this face. She holds the fan like a woman who has learned to own a room. He called her his 'petit soleil', his little sun. Look at the sleeve. The paint itself becomes the light. She died at thirty-four. Ten years after this quiet afternoon.