CURRENTLY NOT ON VIEW
Aristide Maillol
Bust of Renoir, 1907
Cast bronze
Gift of Carl D. Lobell
Currently off site for conservation.
Artist Jacob Epstein once wrote that, “The successful portrait sculptor…needs a front of brass, the back of a rhinoceros, and all the guile of a courtier. While I have done a certain number of portraits, the history of those portraits for the most part is a story of failure to please the sitters or their relatives.”
French sculptor Aristide Maillol faced additional pressures outside the norm in this portrait bust of Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Beyond merely being Maillol’s friend, Renoir was a towering figure in the French art world, having built a critically acclaimed career as an Impressionist painter. Maillol captured the likeness of the elderly Renoir at work in an old white hat, suffering from the constant, ravaging pain of incurable arthritis. As Renoir’s son recounts, “[Maillol] worked on it in the studio while my father painted. He never asked Renoir to pose. He was so imbued with his subject that the likeness seemed to grow more and more apparent with every touch he put on his material.”
Ultimately, Renoir admired the bust so much that he took up sculpture himself.