“The Dancer”
Isn’t she lovely?
“The Dancer” is an oil on canvas painting by the French artist, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, from 1874. Renoir painted this piece at the onset of the Impressionism art movement.
In this painting, Renoir paints a beautiful ballerina. She stands in the fifth position, half-turned, and looks directly at the viewer. It is a classic portrait with a modern subject. The overall color palette is light, with her baby blue ballet costume, pink slippers, soft rouge on her cheeks, pink lips, strawberry blonde hair, and an indistinct green background. She stares back at the viewer, her eyes a piercing blue. A blue ribbon adorns her hair. The only dark on the canvas comes from her choker and bracelet.
This painting wonderfully displays Renoirs brilliant technique of drawing the viewer’s attention to his subject’s face. Renoir uses shorter brushstrokes in the detail of her face. The rest of the image is painted with much longer, less precise brush strokes.
This is one of the paintings displayed at the first exhibition of the Impressionist artists in April 1874. At the time, the collective group of artists were called Société anonyme coopérative des artistes peintres, sculpteurs et graveurs. The artists formed a collaborative society to provide a venue for anyone who wanted to show their work. This allowed greater artistic freedom and expression and provided an alternative to the famous Paris Salon, that only selected more conservative art, such as academic and large-scale history paintings. This first Impressionism show was located at the salon of Nadar, the famous French photographer.
The whole school of art and the group of artists who followed it were named after this piece and inadvertently by the art critic, Louis Leroy, who attended their first collective art show in 1874. He used the name of Monet’s painting to inspire the name of his article, “The Exhibition of the Impressionists” which was printed in April 1874 in Le Charivari. The name was meant as a derision, but the artists took the label with pride, and the movement became known afterwards as Impressionism.
In his article, Leroy wrote of “The Dancer” as follows:
Upon entering the first room, Joseph Vincent received an initial shock in front of the Dancer by M. Renoir.
“What a pity,” he said to me, “that the painter, who has a certain understanding of color, doesn’t draw better; his dancer’s legs are as cottony as the gauze of her skirts.”
Although never identified by Renoir, many believe the sitter to be the actress, Henriette Henriot, who he painted several times during the 1870s. “The Dancer” was purchased by art collector, Charles-Henri Deudon, in 1878.
“The Dancer” is part of the collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the United States.
For more on Pierre-Auguste Renoir, please visit his short biography here.
You can find more artists to learn about here.
