 Hey everybody, my name is Martha Lucy and I am deputy director for research, interpretation and education at the Barnes Foundation. Today we are going to be looking at a painting by Pierre Auguste Renoir called Leaving the Conservatory and it was done around 1876 or 1877. At the Barnes, it hangs in one of the upstairs galleries. This is room 23. And first of all, you can see that it's hanging between two paintings from medieval paintings showing religious subjects. So already you're seeing sort of what's unusual about the Barnes and the way that Albert Barnes mixed up his works of art by different cultures and time periods. But what I want you to notice here really is how big the painting is. It's about seven feet tall and this is unusual for Impressionist paintings. Most of them are small, a couple feet wide, maybe foot tall. And there was a practical reason for this which was Impressionism was really so much about painting out in nature directly in front of your subjects. And so you had to have canvases that were of a portable size. And so, yeah, so it's unusual that Renoir is he's one of the only Impressionists who sometimes painted on this large scale. So it has the effect of the figures being almost life-size. What you're looking at here, so it's called, again, it's called Leaving the Conservatory. And you're looking at a group of students who are standing outside of a conservatory that was an actual place in Paris. It was in the ninth arrondissement, so in the north part of the city. And it offered free classes on voice coaching, music lessons, and acting lessons. And interestingly, you don't see the much about the setting in this painting. So, you know, Renoir is giving us very little information about where they are. You can't really see the street, you can't make out any details of the building. It's sort of this blank background, very neutral. The only clue that we have other than the title that this is figures standing outside of a conservatory is the scroll that is in the woman's hands right here. That's probably a piece of music or some sort of dramatic text. So even though there's not a lot of information in the background, there is tons of information packed into the group of people. First of all, he is, you know, it's a big group. You can see that there's a crowd behind them. It's unclear whether these students are waiting to go into the conservatory or whether they've just come out. But our eye is really kept in the foreground on those four figures that are closest to us, these two men here and these two women here. And looking at their clothing tells us a lot about when this was painted. They are definitely people of their time. They are wearing fashions that are very much sort of a la mode. This dress here is a princess line dress and that was a style that was introduced in the early 1870s where you had kind of long, long panels that hung down without any kind of vertical or sorry, without any kind of horizontal element at the waist. And so she's wearing something that was very trendy at the time. And the men are dressed in fashionable suits and kind of high heel boots. So anybody looking at this painting in the 1870s would have recognized them as contemporaries. The way that we can do that now with contemporary fashions. Just to zoom in a little bit on some of these details here because they're fun to look at. I want to just first point out that the scroll which from a distance looks sort of white is actually really brushed through with all these blues and the materials probably lace at the end of the sleeves right there. But then just all this attention to detail in the costumes. Even the buttons that go down the front of this dress and the stripes on this man's suit. Renoir was always very attentive to fashion when he painted his figures. He loved fashion. He loved not necessarily for himself. He was a pretty simple dresser but his father was a tailor. And so he was very aware of what the latest trends were and he used the trends to communicate to people looking at his paintings about sort of who these people were in society. Now the other information that this painting gives us is communicated so much of it through gesture and body language. And it's really fun to look at what's going on this kind of interaction here between these two men and these two women. I think that the hands really tell us a lot. Every single, each of these four people, their hands are kind of doing something important. You know, she holds the scroll but she's got her hands kind of laced through the arms, through the arm of the other woman telling you that they're good friends, they're buds. And over here, this guy kind of has one hand behind his back. It looks like there's a flirtation going on. I sort of imagine that these men and women don't know each other and that they're meeting. Maybe not, but that's sort of what I imagine. And I think that that's what Renoir wanted was for you to kind of wonder what was going on here. But he has his hand behind his back in a way that almost makes him look like nervous. Like maybe he's fiddling with his fingers. And then if you notice this guy, he has his hand on his friend's back as if he's sort of maybe sort of gently gesturing him forward. Like come on, talk to these women. And look how he's, this one is striding, you know, sort of moving forward a little bit, like his leg is kind of in the space of the women. But she is leaning forward, sort of, you know, receptively. She is very much locking eyes with this guy. And it sort of seems like the friends are waiting to see what they're going to say to each other. Like the faces in the background are interesting too. You know, very summarily rendered except for this one, which I find really unusual. Who is why didn't he kind of blur out her face? It just makes me wonder who that woman was. At the same time that the gestures and the body language and the fashions tell us a lot about these people. You also don't know what's going on, you know, you don't know what their conversation is. I mean, you have a sense. But the thing that's interesting about that is that that's kind of what it's like in real life when you see people on the street having a conversation. You know, you get these snippets of people's conversations. Maybe you overhear a word or you look at them and you kind of imagine what they're talking about from a distance. So and also because the painting is so life size, it really does feel like you are interacting with actual people on the street. Which I just find really interesting and especially because that was so much of what people were experiencing in at this time period during the rise of modernism when the population in cities was growing. So quickly and there were crowds of people and you couldn't know everyone anymore. You could only see people in sort of throngs and kind of wonder maybe what they were talking about. So I think he captures this, the modern experience of the crowd. But at the same time, he doesn't make the experience of the crowd feel alienating the way that or anonymous the way that some of his colleagues did. So while we might say, OK, Renoir must have set up his easel right on the street in front of a group of random people and painted what he saw. So that's what the impressionists are known for painting directly from nature painting directly from from what is observed painting the fleeting moments of modern life. But that is not in fact what happened here. We know from some accounts given by Renoir's friends that these students are not actually posed or standing in front of the conservatory. They're actually posed in front of Renoir's studio in Montmartre. So they're outside on the street, but they're they're not where the painting purports to be or where the scene purports to be. And the people in the painting are not random strangers. This man was one of Renoir's friends, George Riviere. And this woman here was one of Renoir's favorite models, Nini. So it's a constructed image. It's a constructed scene. And I think that that's a great reminder of how often impressionist painters really did think about about composition and not everything was just a sort of faithful replication of what they were seeing. So that is it for today. Please join us again tomorrow. Thank you.