MASP

Lise Tréhot (1848-1922) posed for Pierre-Auguste Renoir multiple times, including for some of the most important paintings of his early career. It is believed that they were intimate. Between 1865 and 1872, Renoir exhibited mainly in salons, which selected the artworks based on a restrictive approach to canonic themes. In search of legitimation, the painter complied with this repertoire of images, so Lise represented several roles. Bather with a Griffon Dog — Lise on the Bank of the Seine, from the MASP collection, was exhibited at the 1870 salon, next to Odalisque, painted in the same year in a smaller format but still featuring Lise as a model. From the Renaissance to academic art, the painting tradition limited the representation of naked bodies to mythological themes, with goddesses and nymphs bathing or standing at the margins of a river. Artists resorted to these motifs as a strategy to study the body. In the second half of the 19th century, bathers became frequent characters of naturalist paintings that were already detached from the ideals of beauty represented by Venus and Diana. Bathing was an act that authorized nudity as an everyday activity. Renoir’s work contains a succession of art history references: it cites a famous painting by French artist Gustave Courbet (1819-1977), The Bathers (1853), which, in turn, was inspired by a photograph by Julien Vallou de Villeneuve (1796-1866) — Study From Nature, Nude Number 1935 (1853) — as well as evoking the Venus of Cnidus. Today, we cannot help but read the painting as a representation of a queer gaze: one woman languidly observes the other. In this context, the small griffon dog could be a symbol of undisciplined desire.

— MASP Curatorial Team, 2020

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By Luciano Migliaccio
Kenneth Clark states that “all those who wrote about Renoir highlight his veneration of the female body, and quote the artist himself, as saying that it would have been difficult for him to devote himself to painting had he not felt this veneration. Nevertheless, nudes are rare in his paintings before his forties”. The Masp painting – Lise on the Banks onthe Seine – Bather with a Griffon Dog –, allegedly, the first known example. Lise Tréhot, whom Renoir met in 1865 and who was his favorite model until 1872, also sat as a model for this work (Camesasca 1989, p. 137), in which Renoir evokes Courbet’s Bathers (1853, Montpellier, Musée Fabre), and in which the master’s influence is perceived in the figure Lady Smiling (Portrait of Alphonsine Fournaise), a quotation from Young Ladies of the Seine (Petit-Palais, Paris 1857). The painting was exhibited in the 1870 Salon where it received negative reviews from Goujon, Duranty, and Mezin. Caricaturist A. d’Arnoux, known by the alias Bertall, satirized it, deeming it a pornographic work. At the exhibition Renoir won more plaudits for the painting titled The Women of Argel (Washington, National Gallery), painted in tribute to Delacroix. Chaumelin thought he could see in the Bather a parody of the Venus Medici (Florence, Uffizi), while Reinach pointed to its affinities with the Cnidian Venus (Rome, Musei Vaticani), which Renoir must have had the opportunity of acquainting himself with through copies and which he reproduced in a reversed posture.

— Luciano Migliaccio, 1998

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