Description
The woman commands the canvas, seated well forward of the man beside her, her dark hat piled with black feathers that curl and cross like ink strokes against the deep red-brown wall behind her. A double string of pearls circles her throat and falls in a loose loop over her chest, catching thick dabs of white and cream that read as light bouncing off each bead.
Her dress is the real showpiece of paint here: sleeves and bodice striped and mottled in tawny brown, grey-blue and black, applied in twisting, almost furlike strokes that could be silk brocade or fur trim, Renoir never quite lets you decide which. Her bare forearm rests along the curved arm of a wicker chair upholstered in a faded pink floral print, rings visible on her fingers, the hand painted loosely but the rings picked out in small bright touches.
Behind her right shoulder sits the man, painted with far less incident: a trim dark moustache, slicked hair, grey jacket and waistcoat, a soft grey cravat knotted high at the collar. He looks off to the side rather than at the viewer, his face built from smoother, flatter strokes than his companion’s, which pushes him further back into the picture both physically and in attention. Double portraits like this, two sitters sharing one canvas, are far rarer in his work than the single figure he painted again and again, and by 1910 he was giving most of his attention to bathers rather than to society commissions of this kind.
The background is a single warm expanse of rust and ochre, brushed on in broad vertical sweeps that leave the wall behind the sitters almost abstract. Against that plain heat of colour, the pearls, the feathered hat and the patterned dress read as bursts of detail, giving the whole portrait a sense of two people caught mid-conversation in a softly lit room rather than posed stiffly for the occasion.
