Pierre-Auguste
Renoir

Renoir was always surrounded by women who loved and admired him wholeheartedly: professional models, his beloved, social lionesses and Parisian celebrities. The artist and all his women were bound by sincere complicity in one important matter. People who lived at the same time as Renoir claimed: the artist and his cheerful, eternally singing and chatting models created a new world together, copied his ideals and repainted in new colors.

Lisa was the first youthful love of Renoir, about which he preferred not to speak in old age. Renoir was 24 when he got into the house of the architect Jules Le Coeur and saw the 18-year-old Lisa Treot. For the first time Augusta captured passion, as strong as painting. He either suffered from the remorse of conscience that he had abandoned work for a few days, or was in seventh heaven with happiness — somewhere equal. At this time, he writes his beloved constantly: Liza the hunter, Liza under the umbrella, Liza Odaliska. Lisa is inspiring, but Lisa is charming and distracting.

In this student period, using the portraits of Lisa Treo, you can track the artistic quest of a young artist: a shy masquerade with a killed deer and fur draped over Diana's hips - this is also an attempt to inscribe her desire to portray nude in the cupid-etheric tradition (Renoir was suggested that his Lisa in the background of the landscape without these divine attributes - just scandal and shame), Lisa under an umbrella is clearly written in the open air, here the sun and the shadow already become participants in the plan, Lisa-odaliska is a curtsy towards Delacroix.

The novel lasted 7 years, Renoir lived with Lisa in the summer in small, quiet towns away from Paris, the girl's parents took him home and had no doubt about the imminent wedding. Art historian Jean-Paul Crespel suggested that a sudden and unexpected gap for all happened for an obvious reason: Renoir was not going to marry at all, and one day Lisa Treault found out about it.

On Montmartre, Renoir settled in 1876 - he decided to write a large multi-figure painting in the open air, in Moulin de la Galette. True, I had no idea how to do this. Baby Margot Auguste met here.

Renoir was desperately in love with a red-haired laughter with colorless eyelashes - she so naturally posed and so loudly sang street songs in the studio. He paid for the sessions she missed, he worried when Margot easily communicated with the most dangerous Montmartre types. Friends said that the artist frankly flatters his model - and only a desperate romantic and a blind man can find her attractive. Most likely, the most picturesque Margot looks like a real one herself just in the episode from “Moulin de la Galette” - she is in a light dress dancing with a knight and looking at us merrily.

The impressionist Renoir, of course, does not care that Margot has colorless eyelashes. Her portraits are an impression: from those songs that she sings, from that embarrassed grace with which she undresses, from the exciting immediacy with which she sways on a swing. His most important passion has always been “to iron and move nature”, getting to its inner essence.


Margarita Legrand was only 20 when she fell ill with typhus. Renoir paid for a long, hopeless and useless treatment, turned for help to his fellow doctors. But his favorite model and his cheerful, courageous, rough, straightforward lover slowly melted away. The funeral of Baby Margot also paid for Renoir.

“She has plenty of imagination, she doesn’t have to lie to anything,” said Marie-Clementine (she would become Suzanna later) to Toulouse-Lautrec. No one ever knew what was really going on in the head of Valadon, where she really disappeared for several days, when she was telling the truth, and when she was lying, who the father of her child was. She was called "terrible Marie." No one for a long time knew that every day, at any free moment she draws herself, chalk on asphalt, coal on the walls, on any piece of paper that came to hand.

Valadon - beloved model of Montmartre, Valadon - beloved Toulouse-Lautrec. Valadon, who worked at the age of 11, a former seamstress, nurse, waitress, saleswoman, laundress, and circus player, now poses for Puvis de Chavannes, Lautrec and Renoir. For some reason, she really needs to be close to the artists, to participate in their meetings, to be in the workshops.

Suzanne Valadon posed for Renoir for two paintings from the dance series. On third - "Dance in the village"- not she, but big love, future wife and passion of Renoir, Alin Sharigo. Renoir, as always, is fascinated, the “terrible Marie” is terrible for anyone, but not for him. There can not be a scary girl with such skin and an oval face.

Toulouse-Lautrec accidentally saw the drawings of Marie, she herself would never have shown them to anyone. "You are ours"will say Edgar Degaswhen he was brought to him confused and stunned by the recognition Valadon. Suzanne will be a successful artist, the only love of the composer Eric Sati, the first woman in the National Society of Fine Arts, will marry and at the age of 44 will leave her husband for a 23-year-old artist Andre Utteru, with whom will live 20 years.

Valadon was eccentric, emotional, cruel, cold, calculating, passionate, quarreling and fighting with her grown son artist Maurice Utrillo, could paint one picture for ten years, deceived and played suicide, sat naked at the table, fed her paintings to a goat. But it is so easy to forget about all this when you see how amazing, young, thoughtful Suzanne braids her hair in a picture painted by Renoir.

Gabriel is a model who appears more often than anyone else in Renoir’s paintings. More often invited and professional, more often close friends and lovers, more often than artist's wife.

Renoirs took off in one year a villa on a hillside in Grasse. It was summer - the season of collecting roses for the manufacture of perfumes. And it turned out that all the girls in the town were busy with this business. Auguste despaired of finding a model, and even girls with the most dubious reputation refused to undress in front of the artist. And then Renoir suddenly remembered that Gabrielle had already turned 20, she was beautiful and was so used to seeing nude models in the patron's workshop that she had long ceased to be embarrassed. For five years now she has been looking after children in this family, and every now and then appears in the pictures - only as a secondary hero. This summer, Gabriel will finally be the main character.

The tacit status of his beloved model did not prevent Gabriel from remaining the most cheerful and adored nanny and the most indispensable assistant of the artist. For the sessions in the workshop, she put on translucent lace dresses, ordered specially for her in the Kallo bohemian workshop, and then changed into a home dress, cleaned Renoir's palette, played with the children and looked after the garden.

Gabrielle married only after the death of Auguste Renoir.

Renoir, painfully ill and aging, urgently needed a blonde model for a new picture. Madame Alin Renoir got out of the house, got on the tram to Nice and came straight to the Academy of Painting to look for her husband blonde. On the same tram, Andre Gessling, Dede, as everyone called her then, will come every morning to the Renoirs' house and pose for the Bathers.

“Rubens would have been satisfied with her,” Renoir admired his 16-year-old muse and worked on the new picture as quickly as he had not worked for a very long time. Alyn died, the house was empty and seemed to be deprived of light and joy. Dede burst in here like a warm summer wind, fake, sang street songs, which delighted the artist, laughed, told stories about all her acquaintances and delighted with her “simple and noble manner of posing.”


Pilot Jean Renoir, who survived a wound during the war, was 24 (like his father during a meeting with Lisa), when he came to the villa "Collette" to take a vacation with his parents. Here he met Andre and fell in love. Every evening Jean and Andre went to the cinema, every day they talked about the cinema. They were married after the death of Auguste, lived for a few more years at Collette, and Jean once decided to become a film director to make a wife out of his wife. Then a pseudonym appeared - and Andre became Catherine Gossling. It was a crazy love story. To the cinema.

The last favorite model of Auguste Renoir played the main roles in four films of his son, and could not forgive her husband for refusing to take on the main role in the film “Bitch”. Catherine Gossling continued to be removed after the divorce, but the star Jean did not make it out of it.

The world after Renoir

Photos of many favorite Renoir models can be found on the net - and Jeanne Samary (see below - photo and Renoir portrait of Jeanne Samary), and Miziya Edwards, and Catherine Gossling, and many others in these black and white photos are completely different from Renoir heroines. But external similarity will not tell much about what these women were like, their photos “do not move nature”, unlike portraits. Their photographs are evidence of the past, while portraits are forerunners of the future.