Pierre
Auguste Renoir

This double portrait sold at Christie's New York in May 2022. It depicts Renoir’s close friend and fellow Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot, and her daughter (whose father was Édouard Manet's brother Eugène), in an intimate composition that highlights Renoir's exceptional ability to capture personality through portraiture. Created five years after Eugène Manet's death, the portrait reflects the close friendship between the artists during Morisot's widowhood. The piece was gifted to Berthe, and then passed down to Julie after Berthe’s death. The work’s appeal for collectors in 2022 comes not just from its personal significance to the artist and its rich exhibition history across Europe, the US, and Asia, but also its clear demonstration of the more defined brushstrokes and richer palette that are characteristic of Renoir’s later works.

Dans Les Roses (1882) achieved this impressive result at Sotheby's New York in May 2003 and is one of Renoir's most accomplished garden portraits. The painting depicts Madame Marie Henriette Valentine Billet Clapisson, commissioned by her husband, Paris stockbroker Louis Léon Clapisson. However, neither Renoir nor Clapisson was happy with this initial portrait, so another was attempted the following year, this time with a much more formal composition and colour palette. The painting was created soon after Renoir’s travels in Italy, which prompted a development in his painterly approach, away from Impressionism and towards a more classical style with structured elements. The meticulous rendering of the floral setting and the sitter's elegant pose exemplify Renoir's career-long fascination with using nature to enhance the intimacy of his depictions of women.