Shop art print and framed art Portrait, dit de Margot by Auguste Renoir

Tête de femme de profil (Head of a Woman in Profile) is a painting by the French painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, painted in 1878 and now in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. Margot (Marguerite Legrand), one of Renoir's favourite models, whose features appear in many of the painter's paintings from the 1870s onwards (see The Reader), poses for the picture. Margot was a charming young girl from Montmartre who "had skin that reflected the light" (Renoir's own words) and who died of typhoid fever in February 1879. Her death, of course, was a cause of great sadness for the painter. The work, which passed to the doctor Paul Gachet (a passionate collector of Impressionist paintings), entered the Louvre in 1951, before finding its definitive home in Orsay in 1986. The work is presented as a photographic snapshot taken by Renoir in front of the motif that seduced him. Margot is captured in a framing that accentuates the gracefulness of her pose, with her pensive gaze turned towards who knows where, illuminated by the light that floods her face. The whiteness of her skin, while highlighting her pink lips, is treated by a very studied modelling, giving the face an almost porcelain delicacy. Renoir, by differentiating the pictorial treatment of the different parts, also managed to convey the sensitive impression of the parts that particularly caught his attention, such as the white scarf and the blond hair. The brushstrokes, as in almost all Renoir's work of those years, are quick, casual and [...]

 

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

 

« Portrait, dit de Margot » is kept at Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France.

 

Find the full description of Portrait, dit de Margot by Auguste Renoir on Wikipedia.