Portrait of the Actress Jeanne Samary
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841 to 1919) · 1877
A young woman with reddish gold hair and a bright open face leans her chin on her hand and looks out at you with a half smile. She wears a low cut blue green dress, and behind her the background is a wash of rose pink, so that she seems to glow. Her name was Jeanne Samary, she was twenty years old, and she was already a star of the Comédie Française, the great Paris theatre, famous for her laugh and her soubrette roles in Molière. Renoir painted her several times, and this small canvas is the freshest of them.
Look at how loosely it is painted. The dress and the background are little more than sweeps of thin colour, the hand is a few strokes, and all the effort has gone into the face, where warm pinks and cool blues mix in the shadows to give the skin its light. Renoir called the picture Rêverie, daydream, when he showed it at the Impressionist exhibition of 1878. The pink and the green are complementary colours, and their vibration against each other is what makes the portrait feel alive. Compare it with the formal full length portrait of Samary that Renoir painted the following year, now in the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg.
The painting was bought in Paris by the Moscow collector Ivan Morozov, the quieter and more careful of the two great Russian collectors of French art. After the revolution his collection was nationalised and in 1948, when the Museum of New Western Art was closed on Stalin's orders as a hotbed of bourgeois formalism, it was split between Moscow and Leningrad. This portrait stayed in Moscow, and it has been one of the most loved pictures in the city ever since.
Did You Know? Jeanne Samary died at thirty three of typhoid; Renoir's portraits are the main reason her name survives.
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