The theme of the woman styling her hair and, more broadly, that of the woman at her boudoir, has artistic lineage dating back to Renaissance vanitas portraits, in which the female subject gazes in front of the mirror, an object of visual pleasure. Masters such as Bellini, Titian and Rubens all explored this theme and here we see Renoir borrowing from these masters both in subject matter and color palette, his creams and golds harmoniously providing the composition with a subdued warmth.

The Boudoir Across the Centuries
  • Donna allo specchio, Circa 1515
  • Lady Lilith, 1867
  • Dressing the Hair, circa 1794–95
  • Elles: Woman Combings Her Hair, 1896
  • Woman Combings Her Hair, circa 1888-90
  • La Coiffure, 1894
  • Nude Woman Combings Her Hair, 1913
  • Woman with Blond Armpit Combings Her Hair by the Light of the Stars, 1940
  • Combings the Hair (Cote d’Azur), 2013
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Young Woman Braiding Her Hair, 1876, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

The ritual of hair-combings has historically been an erotically charged motif, its intimate nature hinting at voyeuristic, and somet.mes s fetishistic, tendencies for artists and viewers alike. As early as the eighteenth century, Japanese woodblock prints of the Edo period depicted women in pleasure-houses styling their hair; while in the nineteenth century Henri Toulouse-Lautrec often included the intimate act of hair-combings in his scenes of Parisian brothels. Other nineteenth-century artists, such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, would evoke Italian Renaissance ideals but it wasn’t until Impressionists such as Edgar Degas, Mary Casatt and Berthe Morisot, aiming to depict the mundane in all its familiar glory, subverted any erotic connotations by depicting the act as a daily routine.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Jeune fille se peignant, circa 1896, oil on canvas, sold: Sotheby’s, Hong Kong, March 31, 2019 for $2,621,186

This subject was of central importance to Renoir’s oeuvre and he would turn to it many t.mes s in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “The ostensible theme,” John House has written, “is self-adornment and women’s preoccupation with appearance; but the vision that is being realised is of course Renoir’s own: while the model prepares herself for display, she displays herself to the painter, who posed her thus, and to the viewer of the picture” (John House in Renoir (exhibition catalogue), Hayward Gallery, London, 1985, p. 282). Renoir’s boudoir paintings fall into the unique middle ground between the eroticized and the mundane. The artist delights in the extravagantly long and undone hair of his models, yet his paintings hint at a subtle intimacy over the overtly eroticized.

Artist
Pierre-Auguste Renior