PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR

Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Aline Charigot had only just begun living together when he painted this portrait of her. Some eighteen years his junior, she had been a seamstress who modelled for the great painter before their romance began, and though he named this painting after the house plant she looks at, we can understand it as a declaration of domestic bliss. With jewel like colors and loose, fluid brushwork, it is the work of a painter totally at ease, both of his mastery of the medium and of his life in general. Charigot’s dress falls provocatively off her shoulder, yet the painting is not erotically charged, instead it is quiet, gentle, and content. The room is imperfect, with flowers laid down atop a credenza awaiting their vase and the table unkept - it is wholly lived in, and comfortable. Charigot is depicted unaware, gazing off to admire the flora ahead of her, we are given a glimpse into the interior life of the couple, our presence unnoticed, or at least unacknowledged. 

DEBORAH WILLIAMS REMINGTON

Born to a storied American family and descended from Frederic Remington who’s genre paintings helped define the public imagination of the wild west, Deborah Williams Remington played a quiet part in her own revolution. As a member of the burgeoning San Franciscan beat scene in the early 1950s, she was part of a group of six artists who opened the ‘Six Gallery’. In 1955 they hosted Allen Ginsberg for his first ever poetry reading, performing an early version of ‘Howl’ to small crowd. Remington was the only woman in the small group of organisers, and the event she had planned kicked off the Beat Movement across America, but quickly wrote her out of the story. Leaving the machismo of 50s literary San Francisco, she travelled across Asia, learning traditional calligraphy in Japan and absorbing color theory in India. She settled in New York on her return and became a leading ‘hard edge’ abstract painter, rebelling against the painterly forms of the abstract expressionists and instead finding beauty in rigid, almost mechanical formulations. The composition of her pieces is at once confrontational and gentle, speaking to a life of fighting against, of finding her own path, pushing up against darkness and answering with beauty and light.

PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR

A gentle joy exudes from every brushstroke. The radiance of youth and the calm of a warm summers day wash over us as Renoir’s delicate hand creates an image that seems to exist in both reality and fantasy at once. The central figure gazes absentmindedly into the distance, her face filled with contentment while her younger sister stares at us, rendered in a looser hand to look as if she has just run into the frame. This is at the heart of Renoir’s brilliance; he is able to create scenes that are at once totally accessible, concerned with beauty and leisure, while hiding in them something of the radical. The background, in sharp contrast to the realism of the girls, appears almost as a stage set, lacking focus and depth. Colors dance alongside each other, trees disappear into shimmering rivers and a town emerges like a fairytale across the water. Every element is perfectly balanced, it glows with the light of a dream and exists in a world without worry.