Mulher depenando um frango (Femme plumant un poulet) - Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Mulher depenando um frango (Femme plumant un poulet) - Pierre-Auguste Renoir

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OST - 55x46 - 1906

At the turn of the twentieth century, Renoir renewed his interest in scenes of everyday life, a subject he had largely set aside after 1883, during his Ingresque period. This phase was marked by rigorous draughtsmanship, clear contours and a more classical handling, as he temporarily abandoned the blurred, animated brushwork characteristic of Impressionism. Throughout this period and into the 1890s, he idealised his models in an effort to rival the Old Masters, particularly Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, as well as Raphael, whose work he encountered during his journey to Italy in 1881. The trip inspired in him a desire to recover a certain academic rigour and to reassess the foundations of his artistic practice.

When Renoir painted Femme plumant un poulet in 1906, however, he was not simply returning to the principles of his youth: he was reinterpreting them in the light of the pictorial investigations he had pursued over the preceding decades. This period therefore represents a particularly compelling moment in his artistic development, when Classicism and Impressionism appear gradually to have been reconciled. As Claude Roger-Marx wrote: ‘From one work to the next, through contradictions and reversals, Renoir searched for himself with infinite patience. Once the “dry crisis” was behind him, he developed a style that would remain essentially unchanged until the end: a very warm palette based on harmonies of red and orange, fluid contours, generous modelling, and weighty forms tending to dissolve into light. Having achieved a true balance between observation and vision, Renoir henceforth followed his natural instincts.’

Around 1900, he gradually reintroduced scenes of bourgeois domestic life into his repertoire, particularly women from his circle engaged in household activities: embroidering, as in Christine Lerolle brodant (Christine Lerolle Embroiedering) of 1897; teaching children; or preparing the family meal, as in the present work. This subject - and more specifically that of a cook plucking a bird - reflects both Renoir’s interest in the Old Masters and the Impressionists’ engagement with domestic and rural life, particularly in the work of Camille Pissarro, while evoking a certain nostalgia for the simple rhythms of peasant life.

The legacy of the Ingresque period remains evident in this work. The body is more firmly constructed, and the figure of the model, shown at work, assumes a monumental presence. Although clothed, her body recalls the stooping postures of Renoir’s idealised, voluptuous nudes. Yet his handling is more sensuous here. Classical drawing provides the composition with its structure, even as that structure is dissolved by colour. Renoir’s brushwork is softer and more blended; rather than seeking to record the effects of light with precision, he allows warm tones to flow across the surface of the canvas in his own distinctive way. Light no longer seems merely to be an external phenomenon falling upon objects: it appears to arise from colour itself.

Indeed, Renoir models the woman through touches of pigment, revealing the structure of her body and the subtleties of her flesh. Her gentle face, with full, youthful cheeks, is rendered in a blend of pinks, whites and beiges, while her statuesque shoulders and the curve of her hips are suggested beneath her vivid, sensuous red blouse. Her legs, covered by an apron, emerge amid passages of blue, green, yellow and violet drapery. Colour therefore does more than describe the different parts of the body or clothing: it contributes directly to their construction. Her strong arms firmly grip the bird, further heightening the tension between her physical power and her sensuous delicacy.

This tension between an everyday gesture and the monumentality of the figure is particularly significant. Renoir transforms an ordinary domestic task into a subject of great formal richness. The bird, the clothing, the body and the model’s gestures are brought together in a composition in which the physical substance of the scene matters as much as its luminous quality. The work exemplifies the mature Renoir’s determination to transcend the opposition between drawing and colour, construction and sensation, academic tradition and the legacy of Impressionism.

The fact that the painting has remained in the Durand-Ruel Collection since its creation further enhances its importance for understanding this period in the artist’s career. Femme plumant un poulet exemplifies Renoir’s style at the height of his artistic maturity and his ability to reconcile the different influences that shaped his career. Far from constituting a simple return to Classicism, the work demonstrates how, late in his career, Renoir integrated the lessons of Impressionism into a more structured and monumental conception of the figure. Thus, beneath the apparent simplicity of a domestic scene emerges a deeper meditation on painting itself. Renoir brings together structural rigour and freedom of handling, the monumentality of the body and the sensuousness of colour, the observation of everyday life and a form of idealisation.

Femme plumant un poulet therefore stands as an emblematic expression of this synthesis: Renoir abandons neither Impressionism nor Classicism, but transforms them into a personal pictorial language founded on the warmth of colour, the fluidity of contours and the power of form. This reconciliation, the fruit of several decades of experimentation and reassessment, is precisely one of the most distinctive features of his mature painting. Texto da Christie's.

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