Femme jouant aux cartes, Andrée en costume oriental

Painted circa 1917, Femme jouant aux cartes depicts a beautiful, rosy-cheeked young woman playing cards in a richly draped interior. Comparisons with other portraits of women painted by Renoir during this period suggest that the model may well have been “Dédée,” the nickname of Andrée Heuschling. Dédée arrived at Renoir’s home in Cagnes in 1915, replacing his longtime model Gabrielle Renard, who had married and was no longer available to sit for him, although she remained on good terms with the artist who had immortalized her. Dédée’s character, vitality, and beauty soon captivated Renoir, who is thought to have painted more than a hundred pictures of her. She proved an enlivening presence in the Renoir household, bringing cheerfulness, vitality, and beauty. Renoir’s son, the film director Jean Renoir, would later recall: “She was sixteen years old, red-haired, plump, and her skin ‘took the light’ better than any model that Renoir had ever had in his life. She sang, slightly off-key, the popular songs of the day, told stories about her girlfriends, was gay, and cast over my father the revivifying spell of her joyous youth” (J. Renoir, Renoir, My Father, London, 1962, pp. 398–99). Renoir was not the only member of the family to fall under her spell. Jean would later cast her in several of his films, in which she appeared under the name Catherine Hessling, before marrying her.
In the present work, Dédée seems suspended outside time, her hands occupied with her cards and a bouquet of flowers positioned just behind her. She appears to to merge with the flowers, her presence at once still and radiant. The rosy flush of her cheeks is echoed in the vivid hues of her headscarf, while the diaphanous, billowing folds of her garment suggest the delicate petals of a bloom. This correspondence between feminine and floral beauty is reinforced by the unified treatment of the painted surface, whose chromatic range and rhythmic patterning lend the composition an overarching decorative harmony. The palette is warm and heightened, dominated by pink, red, and gold, with occasional strokes of blue and mauve providing contrast. Translucent layers of paint build upon one another in fluid, animated strokes, creating a surface that seems to shimmer and vibrate with light. As John House has observed, “In technique, composition, and subject matter,” Renoir was deliberately moving away from any suggestion of the fleeting or the contingent, away from the Impressionist preoccupation with the captured instant, towards “a more timeless vision of woman” (J. House, Renoir, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 1985, p. 242).
It was this sense of timelessness, together with Renoir’s profound understanding of volume and space, that would resonate with the next generation of modern artists. Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso, among others, greatly respected his increasingly abstract approach to the painted figure. Matisse declared, “I’ve always felt that recorded time holds no nobler story, no more heroic, no more magnificent achievement than that of Renoir” (quoted in E. Bell and G. Shackelford, eds., Renoir: The Body, The Senses, exh. cat., The Clark Institute, Williamstown, 2019, p. 18). Picasso, too, was deeply preoccupied with Renoir’s figure paintings. He admired the older artist’s ability to transform the human figure into something both monumental and sensuous, even as Picasso pursued radically different forms of modernism. Renoir’s late paintings, with their increasingly simplified contours, expansive volumes, warm and luminous palette, and emphasis on the physical presence of the body, offered Picasso a compelling alternative to the fragmentation of Cubism. “When Picasso returned from Italy in April 1917, he entered a ‘Renoirian crisis,’ during which he attempted to meet the artist, purchase his work, and copy his paintings” (ibid., p. 211). Picasso would ultimately acquire seven works by the Impressionist master, including Portrait de modèle en buste (1916; Musée National Picasso, Paris).