Seated comfortably in a chair, his feet elevated, a cigar held loosely in his left hand and a book propped on his crossed legs, Louis-Edmond Maître is the essence of a gentleman in repose. The drapery behind him and the highly patterned chair and ottoman on which he reclines all signal a fashionable, and perhaps bohemian, interior, nodding to the rage for japonisme in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Louis-Edmond Maître was the son of a prosperous lawyer from Bordeaux, who came to Paris in 1959 for legal training, but ended up taking minor posts in the city’s bureaucracy, while pursuing his interest in painting, poetry and music. His circle of friends included artists such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Frédéric Bazille and Henri Fantin-Latour as well as the poets Charles Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine. This charming depiction of one of Renoir’s closest friends brims with the energy and familiarity of the best Impressionist portraits, a genre that Renoir, more than any other member of the Impressionist circle, would dominate in the decades to come, creating some of the most quintessential images of the t.mes (see fig. 1).

Portrait d’Edmond Maître is one of only a dozen oils that Renoir created in 1871, six of which are portraits, only three of which remain in private hands. As a young artist struggling to afford paint supplies, let alone food, Renoir came to rely on the generosity of his more affluent friends for lodging. In the 1860s and the year 1870, he would often stay with one of his closest friends, the artist Bazille. As Barbara Ehrlich White has illuminated about this t.mes : “On and off for six years, beginning when Renoir was twenty-three, he lived with Bazille in his friend’s succession of Parisian apartments that also functioned as studios… since this last apartment was tiny, Renoir somet.mes s (as in the summer of 1870) stayed with Bazille’s friend Maître, who lived nearby at 5 rue Taranne (now the Boulevard Saint-Germain)” (Barbara Ehrlich White, Renoir, An Intimate Biography, London, 2017, p. 31). Bazille and Renoir would not only live together for much of this period, they would also paint each other’s portraits in 1867 (see figs. 2 and 3).

This circle of artists and friends, which included Maître, Monet, Sisley, Fantin-Latour, Degas, Pissarro and Émile Zola often portrayed each other—some of this from convenience in that they often were together, some from necessity for the poorer members of the group who struggled to afford models. They all shared an interest in the artistic developments of the day and attended Friday evenings at the café with Édouard Manet, who to Renoir perhaps more than anyone else in the group, would serve as a distinct.mes ntor and guide: “Renoir and his friends socialized with Manet each Friday evening…. Other future Impressionists who came to the café meetings included Bazille, Cézanne, Degas, Monet, Pissarro and Sisley. The only two core Impressionists who did not attend the cafe meetings were Morisot and Cassatt, because attending café meetings was not socially acceptable for high-class women. Non-artists who came included Bazille’s close friend Maître, who was a rich dilettante painter and musician, the photographer Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, who went under the name Nadar, and the writer and critic Émile Zola, as well as other critics, writers and collects ors; even though they were not painters, they came to be associated with this modern art movement” (ibid., p. 28). Manet was revered by this group of young artists, so much so that Fantin-Latour painted Manet surrounded by this group in his canvas Un Atelier aux Batignolles, exhibited in the Salon of 1870 (see fig. 4).

The year 1870 was one of rapid shift and change, both among this group of artists and for the country of France. The Franco-Prussian War, which extended from the summer to January of 1871 dispersed the group. Monet and Pissarro fled to London, Cézanne to the south of France, Renoir was drafted but health concerns kept him from seeing battle while Bazille volunteered for the Zouaves, one of the most dangerous and aggressive fighting forces in France. News of his enlistment horrified both Maître and Renoir who wrote him letters imploring him to reconsider. Their fears were justified when, three months later, Bazille was killed in action. France lost decisively to Germany, shifting the balance of power in Europe and crippling the French state with high reparation payments to Germany. As if this defeat was not enough, a civil uprising took place in Paris in early 1871, which would create further misery.

It was against this backdrop that the present work and two related portraits of Maître’s companion Rapha were created (see fig. 5). Renoir’s monumental depiction of Rapha, dated specifically to April of 1871, demonstrates that the artist was living in Paris in the midst of the violence of the Commune. The scene depicted could not seem farther from the civil strife occurring just outside the window Rapha gazes through. Dressed in fashionable clothes and standing by a bird cage and with potted flowers heaped around the floor, this canvas is a bourgeois idyll. After the defeat of the Commune, Renoir “took a room on the rue Dragon, near Maître’s apartment, and soon afterward he painted Maître relaxing indoors, against an exotically flowered drapery, reflecting the vogue for japonisme that held sway in Paris for much of the latter part of the century” (Barbara Ehrlich White, Renoir, His Life, Art, And Letters, New York, 1984, p. 39). In the large-scale portrait of Rapha, her fan also references this trend. Renoir would use this device in later canvases as would artists from Whistler to Monet, Cassatt to Van Gogh (see figs. 6 and 7).

Portrait d’Edmond Maître is imbued with a sense of ease and familiarity, reflecting the years-long friendship between the sitter and the artist. Reflecting on Renoir, Maître related “There is within this person such great honesty and such great kindness, that hearing him talk has always done me good. He is full of common sense, on a closer look, yes, common sense and modesty, and in the most innocent and quiet manner, he relentlessly produces his diverse and refined work, which will make future connoisseurs’ heads spin” (Barbara Ehrlich White, Renoir, An Intimate Biography, London, 2017, p. 22). Maître’s words were prescient. It is Renoir, more than any other artist of the period, who is most emblematic as a figure painter and portraitist. While it would take another decade or two before Renoir was on firm financial footing, he would come to be viewed, as would Monet, as one of the most successful and important painters of his generation.