Pierre-Auguste Renoir - Leaving the Conservatory (Conservatoire The Exit) - fine art print

What does the original artwork description of the Barnes Foundation say about the work of art from the illustrator, painter and sculptor Pierre-Auguste Renoir? (© - by Barnes Foundation - www.barnesfoundation.org)

A close-packed group of men and women is gathered outside a building, their figures set off against its blank, unadorned, windowless walls. In the foreground, two young men engage two of the women in conversation; the women stand arm in arm, and the hand of the further man rests on his nearer companion's shoulder. We have no clue to the content of the figures' interchange, but their body language suggests some uncertainty or awkwardness, as if the men are engaging the women's attention for the first time. The front man's right hand is clasped behind him, as if he is hesitant or anxious as he steps forward to speak to the women, while the nearer woman turns toward him as if in response to his approach. The further woman, her hands tightly clasped together, turns toward her companion as if to gauge her response to the man's overtures. The nature of the interchange is further obscured by the fact that the second, taller man's face is hidden by his companion's hat, denying us any access to his expression. The foreground man wears a fashionable lounge suit, while his companion is in formal evening dress; the women are simply clad, the nearer one wearing a jerkin over a princess-line dress and an underskirt.The first known title of the canvas, Leaving the Conservatory, derives from the auction sale catalogue of the collection of its first owner, the composer Emmanuel Chabrier, in 1896. The title is confirmed by Renoir's friend Georges Riviere, who seems to have posed for the foreground male figure, since it closely resembles a contemporary portrait of him (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). The Conservatoire de Musique et de Declamation was situated in the ninth arrondissement of Paris, to the north of the Grands Boulevards, at the junction of rue dli Consrvatoire and rue Sainte-Cecile (the buildings are now occupied by the Conservatoire d'Art Dramatique, after its separation from the Conservatoire de Musique in 1946); it offered free courses in instrumental and vocal music and "dramatic declamation", including evening courses in "popular song" for adults.However, Riviere's account of the picture shows that it cannot be viewed as a straightforward depiction of the site of the Conservatoire, since he specified that Renoir had painted it in front of the house on rue Cortot in Montmartre, which he had rented, in the autumn of 1876, after completing his Ball at the Moulin de la Galette. Moreover, Riviere noted that "Nini and certain habituees of the Moulin" had posed for it. It is thus a wholly imaginative composition, rather than a representation of a specific scenario. Only the rolled paper in the hands of the foreground figure, which could be music or a dramatic text, hints at the Conservatoire, and we must assume that Nini and her friends were employed by Renoir as paid models, rather than themselves being students at the Conservatoire. Viewed in these terms, the picture becomes a more generic image of contemporary courtship rituals, and more specifically of the long-established stereotype of flirtation between young bourgeois men and the lower-class girls who were far more likely to become their mistresses than their wives. Yet the viewer is given no clue to the outcome of the interchange between the figures. Characteristically, Renoir set up the scenario without indicating the precise relationships between the figures or how they might evolve. The viewer of the picture is set a little apart from the figures, watching them from the side and perhaps coming upon them in passing; we are clearly not an immediate part of the group depicted. What we see opens out a set of possibilities; by denying us the resolution of these potential stories, Renoir highlighted the nature of everyday experience in the modern city, where the passer-by witnesses many interchanges and meetings without gaining access to their significance or their outcome. The whole picture is carefully but informally arranged to suggest a slice of city life.The tonality of the picture is relatively subdued, perhaps suggestive of evening light. Yet its dominantly gray tonality is conveyed throughout by delicate variegations of color; soft blues are set off against traces of warm hues, revolving around the pink flesh accents, the orange-red hair of the two young women on the left, and the figures' white collars. Pure black is, it seems, not used; by this date, Renoir had abandoned black in his search to convey form and atmosphere through contrasts and modulations of color. The edges of the figures are not sharply delineated, so that they appear to merge with each other and with the background.Although Leaving the Conservatory is one of the largest and most ambitious of Renoir's canvases of modern Parisian life, it was not, it seems, included in any exhibitions during Renoir's lifetime; it is especially notable that he did not include it in the third impressionist group exhibition in spring 1877, and it is possible that the picture had not been completed by this date.Nor do we know when Chabrier acquired it, or whether it was a commission or a purchase; the composer's interest in the picture must in part have related to its subject-a complement to the noisy world of popular entertainment represented in Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergere (Courtauld Gallery, London), which Chabrier bought at Manet's posthumous sale in 1884. John House, Renoir in the Barnes Foundation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 89.

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This painting Leaving the Conservatory (Conservatoire The Exit) was painted by the French artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir. The artwork measures the size: Overall: 73 13/16 x 46 1/4 in (187,5 x 117,5 cm) and was painted on the medium oil on canvas. Today, this work of art belongs to the Barnes Foundation's digital collection, which home to one of the world's greatest collections of impressionist, post-impressionist and early modernist paintings. This artwork, which belongs to the public domain is being provided with courtesy of Courtesy of the Barnes Foundation, Merion and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.: . What is more, the alignment of the digital reproduction is in portrait format with a ratio of 2 : 3, which means that the length is 33% shorter than the width. The illustrator, painter, sculptor Pierre-Auguste Renoir was a European artist, whose style can mainly be assigned to Impressionism. The painter lived for 78 years, born in 1841 in Limoges, Nouvelle-Aquitaine, France and passed away in 1919.

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