Jovens à beira-mar (Jeunes filles au bord de la mer) - Pierre Auguste Renoir

Jovens à beira-mar (Jeunes filles au bord de la mer) - Pierre Auguste Renoir

Coleção privada

OST - 56x46 - 1894

The comments of the critic Gustave Geffroy writing about Renoir's paintings in 1894 could have very well be alluding to Jeunes filles au bord de la mer painted the same year: ‘the work of Renoir is a source of enchantment for the eye. It is also a consolation, a balm for the spirit [...] his observations as a landscape painter in Guernsey, in Toulon, in Algeria, wear the harmony of blue and gold, an extraordinary appearance of flamelike glimmering, they are conflagrations of brightness, mirages of light’ (quoted in N. Wadley, Renoir, 1841-1919, pp. 188-189). The almost surreal bright light emanating from Jeunes filles au bord de la mer and its smooth brushstrokes of charming blues, pinks, whites, greens and yellows blurring the composition truly make it ‘an enchantment for the eye’ and a ‘mirage of light’. This composition echoes 18th century French painting of frolicking scenes of gallantry, music and love - the so-called “fêtes galantes” - best captured by masters such as Antoine Watteau, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Jean-Baptiste Pater or Nicolas Lancret. Like his peers, Renoir celebrates life and the beauty of nature, as so evidently illustrated in the present painting. With a clean composition divided in three – the figures in the foreground, the sea and the sky – Renoir draws the attention to the two young girls lying on the ground, one seen from the back contemplating the tranquil seascape and the other gazing out towards two other young girls picking up flowers on the left.

Those two emblematic young girls – the golden-haired one wearing a straw hat with a red bow and the brown-haired one with her pink-ribboned white hat – appear in several of Renoir’s paintings dating from the same period. Attempts have been made by different art historians to identify these two sitters, sometimes as the Lerolle sisters - Yvonne Lerolle and Christine Lerolle, daughters of the collector Henry Lerolle – and other times as Julie Manet, Berthe Morisot’s only daughter, and her cousin, Paule Gobillard. These four young ladies indeed often posed for Renoir and figure in some of his paintings, but it seems that for this particular painting, and other similar scenes such as Baigneuses, neither the figures nor the location of the scene correspond to a defined person or place. This distinction is significant: rather than functioning as a formal portrait, the present work occupies the fertile territory between portraiture and the genre scene, where Renoir could use recurring models to explore the beauty of youthful figures within a landscape. What Renoir sought in Jeunes filles au bord de la mer was to create an ephemeral setting in a blinding light, possibly remembering the landscapes he had admired so much during his trip to Guernsey in 1883 but also possibly blending in the light from the South of France (first discovered in Aix-en-Provence in 1881) or from North Africa (following his trips to Algeria in Spring 1881 and in March 1882).

Yet at the same time, the way in which Renoir portrays the two main figures, observing them from behind, conveys a sense of immediacy but also intimacy. This is also the case in Renoir’s painting In the meadow, 1888-1892, today housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in which the painter omitted the girls’ hats and opted to have them seated rather than laying down as in Jeunes filles au bord de la mer. Furthermore, Renoir put the brunette this time on the left, wearing a light pink dress and the blonde girl on the right with her white dress and blue ribbon belt, inverting the two same models from Jeunes filles au bord de la mer. In the latter, Renoir’s two protagonists gaze out to a calm blue sea, as opposed to the meadow setting chosen for the Metropolitan Museum painting. In other paintings, Renoir focuses on these two young girls’ facial features and psychological dimension, as seen their close-up double portrait, Two Girls Reading (1890-91), today housed in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Here, Renoir offers an intimate portrait of the recognizable blonde girl and brunette from Jeunes filles au bord de la mer, inviting the viewer to participate in their conversation or reading session. Yet Renoir once again interchanges attributes and models, as the brunette’s red-ribboned white hat seen in the Durand-Ruel painting has been passed on to the blonde girl, and the blonde’s straw hat is now being worn by the brunette in the Los Angeles painting. The composition of Jeunes filles au bord de la mer, for which there appears to exist a preparatory oil painting zooming in onto the two central figures, recalls also that of Baigneuses, a painting dated circa 1892, in which the two same young girls can easily be identified although they gaze out to an almost mythological and surreal scene of frolicking bathers. To some extent, it seems that Renoir created this series of paintings of young girls in idyllic, Arcadian settings simply for the pleasure of painting beautiful landscapes and charming figures, as well as for the visual pleasure they provided to the viewer.

Nonetheless, the apparent simplicity of the scene belies the sophistication of Renoir's handling. Rather than defining his figures with a firm contour, he allows them to emerge from a network of freely applied touches of colour. The ochres and warm pinks of the women's dresses and hats are set against the cool blues of the sea and the dense greens of the foreground vegetation. The red ribbon of the principal figure provides a particularly concentrated accent of colour, echoed subtly in the warm tones scattered throughout the composition. In the distance, figures are reduced almost to touches of paint, their scale and indistinctness reinforcing the sensation of space.

In addition to epitomizing the essence of Renoir’s oeuvre, as being a painting of pleasure, happiness and sensuality, Jeunes filles au bord de la mer also stands out for its unique provenance. It belonged to Abbé Paul-Octave Gaugain, a French priest, educator and discerning early collector of modern art. Born into a modest farming family in Boulon, Calvados, he pursued higher education and became a teacher, later directing the Cours Saint-Augustin in Paris. He remained closely connected to his native village, where he served as mayor and benefactor. Gaugain was an unusually early and independent champion of Impressionism, assembling an impressive collection that included masterpieces by Boudin, Cezanne, Degas, Guillaumin, Lépine, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir and Sisley. His collection, comprising just twenty-one lots, was dispersed at the Hôtel Drouot on 6 May 1901, and included several paintings that are now in major museums, such as three works by Monet, La Charrette. Route sous la neige à Honfleur, circa 1867 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris), Printemps, bords de rivière, 1882 (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon) and Printemps à Giverny, 1886 (The Kreeger Museum, Washington D.C.), and by Sisley, Les Coteaux de Bougival, 1875 (National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa). His interest in contemporary art was particularly notable for its prescience: he acquired a work by Cezanne as early as 1894 (Pommes et serviette, 1879-1880, Seiji Togo Memorial Museum of Art, Tokyo), before Ambroise Vollard mounted the artist’s first solo exhibition in 1895.

Gaugain maintained a personal relationship with Pierre-Auguste Renoir and owned at least six works by the artist, some acquired directly from Renoir and others through Paul Durand-Ruel. Among them were La Lecture, 1888, purchased from Durand-Ruel by Gaugain on 3 February 1892; Portrait de deux fillettes, now in the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris; Vue du Palais des Papes, Avignon, and the present work Jeunes filles au bord de la mer, most likely acquired directly from the artist. His direct dealings with Renoir were sufficiently close to occasion playful reproaches from Durand-Ruel, who jokingly accused the artist of being ‘unfaithful’ to his dealer. In one of the letters addressed to Durand-Ruel, Renoir explains himself: ‘I was weak enough to be somewhat unfaithful to you with the Abbé, although what I gave him was rejected and considered horrible by you—which, incidentally, is true. But if I only sold good things, I would starve to death. I thought he would keep these horrors for longer. For four years, he had been asking me for a view of the South. It was a commission that I had long refused to undertake. In the end, I dashed off a view of the Palais des Papes.’ (cited in Anne Distel, ‘Un collectionneur mystérieux de Renoir, l’abbé Paul Gaugain’ in La Gazette des Amis de la Maison Fournaise, Chatou, no. 9, 2013, p. 14). To which Durand-Ruel protested, saying that the paintings are very beautiful and he will not hold this against the painter! Trecho de texto da Christie's.

Nota do blog: Data 2026 / Crédito para Christie's.