Details

Object type

painting

Title

Still Life / Tasse et Mandarines

Artist/Maker

Pierre Auguste Renoir artist

Culture/School

French

Place Associated

France, Cagnes (place made)

Date

1908

Materials

oil on canvas

Dimensions

framed: 401 mm x 493 mm x 105 mm; unframed: 159 x 254 mm

Description

Still Life played a secondary role in Renoir’s oeuvre, but it was a subject that he first tackled in the 1860s and regularly returned to throughout his life. At this late stage in his career it is unlikely that he painted it (as is often the case with artists and still lifes) as an experiment in arranging shape and volume and contrasting colour and texture. Renoir, now settled in Cagnes in the south of France, was badly afflicted by arthritis and would have found it easier to work on such small-scale canvases in the studio, knowing that they would find a ready market.

This tiny oil positively vibrates with warmth and light, the rich yellows and oranges of the fruit playing off against the deep green leaves, and the colder blue and white of the cup and saucer. Darker toned contours around the mandarin oranges distance them from the patterned background which also has touches of orange and green. The white tablecloth, with its blue shadows, also carries notes of reflected light. The work is thinly painted, each object described with quick, free, fluid strokes of paint. The canvas is primed with a light coating which shows through in many areas of the painting, helping to give luminosity to the picture.

Renoir’s son, film director Jean Renoir, has left a moving description of his father in his last years, suggesting that although in evident pain he continued to paint: ‘What struck outsiders coming into his presence for the first time were his eyes and hands. His eyes were light brown, verging on yellow… As for their expression, imagine a mixture of irony and tenderness, of joking and sensuality… Renoir was extremely modest and did not like to reveal the emotion that overwhelmed him while he was looking at flowers, women, or clouds in the sky, the way other men touch and caress. His hands were terribly deformed. Rheumatism had cracked the joints, bending the thumb toward the palm and other fingers toward the wrist. Visitors who weren’t used to it couldn’t take their eyes off this mutilation. Their reaction, which they didn’t dare to express, was “It’s impossible. With those hands, he can’t paint those pictures.”’

This painting once belonged to the collector Maurice Gangnat who at one time owned nearly 160 paintings by Renoir. Gangnat’s collection was sold in Paris in June 1925. It was then owned by the Glasgow collector Leonard Gow, before being purchased by another Glasgow collector, William McInnes by whom it was bequeathed to Glasgow Museums.

Credit Line/Donor

Bequeathed by William McInnes, 1944

ID Number

2420

Location

Kelvingrove French Art Gallery