 Welcome to Barns Takeout. My name is Martha Lucy. I'm Deputy Director for Research, Interpretation, and Education at the Barns. And today we're going to be looking at a painting by Pierre Auguste Renoir called Washer Woman and Child. And here it is in the center of this wall at the barns. We are in room seven, which is on the first floor just off of the main gallery. So I chose this work because Mother's Day is coming up this Sunday. And I can't think of a better picture in the collection that kind of celebrates motherhood. And I'm going to talk about why that is in a few minutes. So this was painted in 1886. And the figures in the painting are Renoir's wife, Eileen Sherry-Go, Renoir, and his first son, Pierre Renoir, who was born in 1885. So he's about a year old here. Pierre was the eldest of the three sons that the Renoirs eventually had. And Renoir painted this when they were in Essois, which is a small rural village about 150 miles southwest of Paris. And that was actually Eileen's hometown. And the Renoir spent summers there. And Renoir, Pierre Auguste Renoir, is actually buried there. So, but the painting's not called Eileen and Pierre. He titled it Washer Woman and Child because I think he wanted it to be a more general celebration of kind of the human relationships, but also of rural life, sort of peasant life. And you can see very faintly in the background that this is almost sort of like a genre scene. It's a portrait, yes, but it's also a genre scene. And there are figures in the background that are hanging laundry. There's actually another version of this painting. It's a pastel that's at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and it was probably done before this oil painting. But in the pastel, you can see those figures in the background much more clearly. So, yeah, it's a celebration of rural life, but more than that, I mean, what this is really about is a celebration of motherhood. And you can see that in the way that Renoir just creates such intimacy and warmth between mother and child here. Look at the way that the bodies are just kind of collapsed together. You can feel the weight of that flesh as Eileen is holding her son. And look at the way I'm going to zoom in on this. I love this detail. The way that her lips are just pressed right up against his little cheek. But also the naturalism in the child's behavior. He's not posing for the picture. He's sort of looking off into the distance the way a child would, maybe kind of squirming a little bit. But what I really love about this, and what I think Renoir captured so well here, is the physicality of motherhood. It reminds me, looking at this picture reminds me of when my kids were small, and I could hold them. And the joy that came from that physical part of the relationship, that the smell of their flesh and the feeling of the flesh kind of pressed against yours and the weight of them in your arms. All of that feeling of oneness that you have with your child when they're little, and when you can hold them. You can tell I missed that. And Renoir really does create a sense of, I think, these two figures as a unit, just in terms of his formal treatment here. He painted this during a time when he was completely rethinking his goals as an artist. So again, this was done in 1886. And he had been one of the main members of the, one of the founding members of the Impressionist group during the 1870s, where their goals were about spontaneity and fleetingness and painting really quickly and sketchily. And he had begun to really rethink that during the mid-1880s. And he said, he said, I think I've taken Impressionism as far as I can go. I need to really go back and relearn how to draw. He became more interested in solidity and kind of the qualities of the eternal rather than the fleeting. So things like solidity and weight and more control over the brush became more important to him. And he actually traveled to Italy a couple of years before doing this because he wanted to really look at Old Master paintings. And he looked at Raphael and he looked at Fresco. And you can see Raphael in this image. I think that he is, you know, we could think of this as almost a, it's a Madonna and child. It's a modern Madonna and child. And he is taking the way that Raphael kind of would frame his Madonna and child images by, you know, he would center the figures and kind of push them up close to the picture plane and just create this real feeling of harmony and balance the same way that the way that Renoir is doing here. Now, I just mentioned, maybe I didn't, that he, when he was in Italy, he looked a lot at Fresco painting. And Fresco painting is done directly. It's done with very dry paint, like a temperate right on, right onto the wall onto, usually onto wet plaster. But it has a sort of matte look to it. And although this is not Fresco, Renoir is actually using oil here. The painting has a kind of matte look to it because I think he's, he's thinking of Fresco and he's trying to imitate that. And, you know, if you look more closely, you can see down here in the apron and in the clothing, really, that the painting does have this matte quality. And what he did was he blotted out as much of the oil as he could from the pigment. And he, before he started painting, he applied a second layer of priming that was this kind of chalky layer because he was trying to, it really seems like he was trying to create this appearance of Fresco. One question that we have about this painting is whether it's finished or unfinished. When you look at the faces of the figures, they're pretty highly worked up. But then all around here, around the edges, it's much sketchier and the figures in the background are very faint. And it looks like he has started blocking in the color down here, but never really finished. Curiously, though, the painting is signed, which suggests that it was finished. So maybe Renoir just sort of got to a point where he said, you know what, I was planning on working up the whole canvas, but this is as far as I want to take it. And there's reason to believe that that's what happened because the person who owned this painting before Albert Barnes was Leo Stein, the brother of Gertrude Stein, and Leo collected with his sister. And he had this painting, and he wrote in a letter to Barnes as Barnes was thinking about buying it. He said, you know, I think that what happened was that Renoir just decided that he was done with this. So it's a question. Um, that is it for our takeout today. Happy Mother's Day. Hi, Mom. Love you. Everybody have a wonderful weekend. Thanks. I'm Tom Collins, new Bauer family, executive director of the Barnes Foundation. I hope you enjoyed Barnes takeout. Subscribe and make sure your post notifications are on to get daily servings of art. 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