Footnotes

This work will be included in the forthcoming Pierre-Auguste Renoir Digital Catalogue Raisonné, currently being prepared under the sponsorship of the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, Inc.

Provenance
Ambroise Vollard, Paris (acquired directly from the artist by 6 January 1912).
Étienne Bignou, Paris.
Crotti Collection, Paris.
Private collection, New York.
Stephen Hahn Fine Art, New York.
Andrea Klepetar-Fallek Collection, New York (acquired from the above on 15 March 1983); her estate sale, Sotheby's, New York, 13 November 2019, lot 149.
Private collection, Paris (acquired at the above sale).

Literature
A. Vollard, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paintings, Pastels and Drawings, Tableaux, Pastels et Dessins, San Francisco, 1989, no. 1225 (illustrated p. 263).

Painted circa 1906, Deux femmes en promenade displays Renoir's mature confidence in his own style, no longer reliant on the whim of patrons as he was in the 1870s, or reverently referencing the Old Masters as in the 1880s. The artist's son, Jean, concluded that 'it was around 1900 that Renoir finally resolved his uncertainties as an artist' (J. House, 'Renoir's Worlds', in exh. cat., Renoir, London, 1985, p. 268).

The son of a bespoke tailor and a dressmaker, Renoir's eye for sartorial detail surely informed the portraiture that played an integral role in his oeuvre. Once described by Camille Pissarro as the 'portraitiste éminent' of Paris, formal commissions paid towards his early artistic education, borne by his introduction to fashionable collectors through the publisher Georges Charpentier. These commissions supported him wholly between 1876-1880, after which the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel began to regularly purchase his work.

Renoir's skill in portraiture was noted by his peers from the outset, as Théodore Duret wrote in his introduction to the artist's first one-man show at Durand-Ruel in 1883: '[In Renoir] we recognize at first sight the ability to paint woman in all her grace and delicacy, which has led him to excel particularly in portraits. The artist has fully displayed this gift of charm from the beginning, and it is in his ability as a painter and colourist that we must observe his progress and development' (B.E. White, Renoir, His Life, Art, and Letters, New York, 1984, p. 132).

The flower detail in the bonnets of the present work recalls both the artist's still lifes of flowers and the influence of his parents' trades. Renoir's love of millinery was noted by Suzanne Valadon, who was both a fellow artist and sometime model: 'Renoir particularly loved women's hats. He put heaps of them on my head... he took me to the milliner's shops; he never ceased buying lots of hats' (Valadon quoted in J. House & M. Lucy, Renoir in the Barnes Foundation, New Haven, 2012, p. 245). In an 1880 letter to an unknown sitter, the artist wrote: 'Come to Chatou tomorrow with a pretty summery hat. Do you still have that big hat that you look so nice in? If so, I'd like that, the gray one, the one you wore in Argenteuil' (Renoir quoted in G. Adriani, Renoir, exh. cat., Tübingen, 1996, p. 204). Renoir was even known to design hats himself, adding more decorative details such as fresh roses.

In comparison to the more formal portraits of the 1890s however, the present work celebrates a relaxed moment of friendship between two young women. Painted in Renoir's later years, the informal portraits of this period reflect the idyllic familial life the artist now led in Cagnes-sur-Mer. The artist's preference for joyful subjects is clear in Deux femmes en promenade, illustrating Renoir's belief that 'for me a picture [...] should be something likeable, joyous and pretty – yes, pretty. There are enough ugly things in life for us not to add to them' (Renoir quoted in J. House, op. cit., p. 14). In this respect, Renoir differed from his Impressionist contemporaries who painted the modern world as they saw it, unembellished and un-idealised. Renoir's oeuvre maintained a distance from artistic doctrine, politics or the developments in photography and cinema which influenced so many others, his timeless compositions rather offering a refuge from the contemporary world, reminiscent of the fêtes champêtres of eighteenth-century French painting.

Having grown restless with the Impressionist movement as a young artist, Renoir had undertaken his own Grand Tour in 1881, rediscovering the works of Jean-Antoine Watteau, Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Eugène Delacroix, as well as exploring the frescoes of Pompeii. This led to a more precise and linear style in the mid-1880s, which was less well received by critics. By the time the present work was created, Renoir had allowed his own painterly application to return, but retained the influence of Classicism in choice of subject, deliberately vague background and idealised forms.

Deux femmes en promenade depicts two young women taking a walk, the artist's fluid, cursive brushstrokes joining the two figures as one. The dusky pink skirts gently fade into the background, a foot just suggested in outline below. The women remain anonymous, their faces rendered only loosely. Renoir's graceful, confident handling was described by Albert André as 'oily squiggles of almost pure tones' which stand boldly against the luminous, sparse background (André quoted in A. Wofsy (ed.), Renoir's Atelier, San Francisco, 1989).

The models are removed from any historical or geographical context, celebrated as the sole focus of the work. Renoir employs his distinctive soft palette but uses primary colours as accents throughout; touches of green unite the background with the hats and blouses, whilst a rose-red hue repeats in the flowers, the ladies' cheeks, forearms and skirts. This was characteristic of Renoir's practice in the early twentieth century – varying his pigments according to the subject and mood he wished to evoke, his palette was a carefully chosen symphony. Executing a portrait in 1901, he placed a pink ribbon in his sitter's hair and commented: 'Now I've got hold of my composition. All the colours will act in relation to that pink, the problem of colour is resolved' [...] Backgrounds were often brushed in thinly over the white priming, but the principal areas of the figure were normally treated more opaquely. His touch remained fluent and supple, modelling forms with the loaded brush without any return to the linearity of his experimental works of the 1880s' (J. House, ibid., p. 268).

The present work was formerly in the collection of Andrea Klepetar-Fellak, whose remarkable life saw her survive the Holocaust as a young woman, take work as a cleaning lady in Israel and forge a new life in Argentina, before finding happiness with her fourth husband, the philanthropist Fred Fallek, in New York. Together, the couple amassed an incredible art collection – their apartment in the Ritz Tower on Fifth Avenue was home to masterpieces by Claude Monet, Pierre Bonnard, Jacques Lipchitz, Max Pechstein, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, and Renoir's Deux femmes en promenade, where it remained until her death in 2019.