Shop art print and framed art Claude Renoir en clown by Auguste Renoir

The Clown is a painting by the French painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, painted in 1909 and housed in the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris. The composition is static, with the weight concentrated near the centre, where the little boy is standing. He is dressed in an amusing way, with a jacket that is decidedly too big for his age, and we can almost imagine him acting out farcical scenes in the theatre. Renoir, on the other hand, is not interested in the psychological excavation of the subject, and instead focuses on modulating the reds that tint his costume. The light floods the stage from the side, and the contrasts between the areas of light and shadow are very blurred. The iconographic style of the painting is in keeping with the portrait tradition of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, echoing paintings by Veronese, Velázquez, Van Dyck and above all Watteau. The scene, in fact, very faithfully reproduces the content of Watteau's Gilles: although the protagonist of the latter work is a sadly absorbed acrobat, Renoir, as we have already mentioned, does not study the psychology of the subject and intends instead to achieve an agile pictorial rendering of red. This medium-format painting has a very curious story behind it. It is in fact Renoir's son, Claude, who is posing for the clown: the little boy is said to have remembered with anguish the long posing sessions, which he experienced with extreme suffering because of the excessive length of his stockings. Renoir's father [...]

 

This artwork is a painting from the modern period. It belongs to the impressionism style.

 

« Claude Renoir en clown » is kept at Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris, France.

 

Find the full description of Claude Renoir en clown by Auguste Renoir on Wikipedia.