instead of a boater. This is an in-joke about his Maecenas uniform between friends, Renoir suggesting that patrons and critics are needed, somewhere in the background, on the edge, even on the sunniest and most liberated of days.
Proust writes of this picture, noting a ‘gentleman…wearing a top hat at a boating party where he was clearly out of place, which proved that for Elstir he was not only a regular sitter, but a friend, perhaps a patron’.
Charles is clearly out of place, but he is a sitter, friend and patron and he is there. Charles Ephrussi – or at least the back of Charles’s head – enters art history.
9. EVEN EPHRUSSI FELL FOR IT
It is July and I’m in my studio in south London. It is down a track between a betting shop and a Caribbean takeaway, sandwiched in amongst car repairers. It’s a noisy area, but it is a beautiful space, with my wheels and kilns in a long and airy workshop and a room up some steep white stairs for my books. It is here that I display some of my finished work, groups of porcelain cylinders placed in lead-lined boxes at this moment; and it is here that I stack my piles of notes on early Impressionism and continue to write about the first collector of my netsuke.
It is a calm space, books and pots being good companions. And this is where I bring clients who want to commission something from me. It is very strange for me to be reading so much about Charles as a patron and his friendship with Renoir and Degas. It is not just the vertiginous descent from doing the commissioning to being commissioned. Or, indeed, from having paintings to writing about them. It is that I have been working long enough as a potter to know that being commissioned is an extremely delicate business. You are grateful, of course, but gratitude is different from feeling indebted. It is an interesting question for any artist: how long must you go on feeling grateful once someone has bought your work? It must have been especially complex given the youth of this patron – thirty-one in 1881 – and the age of some of the artists: Manet was forty-eight when he painted that bundle of asparagus. And, I think when I look at an image of a Pissarro that Charles owned, of poplar trees in a breeze, it must be especially delicate if your artistic credo is of freedom of expression, and spontaneity and lack of compromise.
Renoir was in need of money, and so Charles persuaded an aunt to sit for him; then he began work on Louise. It took a long summer of delicate negotiation between the lovers and the painter; Fanny, writing from the Chalet Ephrussi where Charles was staying, details the lengths to which he went to make sure it all came off successfully. It was quite a labour to bring about these two paintings. The first is of Louise’s elder daughter Irène, with reddish-golden hair, like her mother’s, falling around her shoulders. The second, impossibly saccharine portrait is of the younger girls, Alice and Elisabeth. The two girls also have their mother’s hair. They stand in front of a dark burgundy curtain, held open to reveal the salon beyond, holding hands, as if for reassurance – a confection of pink and blue ruffles and ribbons. Both pictures were exhibited at the Salon of 1881. I’m not sure how much Louise liked them. After all this work she was shockingly late in paying the modest charge of 1,500 francs. I find myself similarly embarrassed when I discover a cross note from Degas reminding Charles about a bill.
All this commissioned work for Renoir made some of Charles’s other painter friends mistrustful. Degas was especially severe: ‘Monsieur Renoir, you have no integrity. It is unacceptable that you paint to order. I gather that you now work for financiers, that you do the rounds with Monsieur Charles Ephrussi, next you’ll be exhibiting at the Mirlitons with Monsieur Bouguereau!’ This anxiety was compounded when Charles started buying pictures by other artists; this patron seemed to be moving
Proust writes of this picture, noting a ‘gentleman…wearing a top hat at a boating party where he was clearly out of place, which proved that for Elstir he was not only a regular sitter, but a friend, perhaps a patron’.
Charles is clearly out of place, but he is a sitter, friend and patron and he is there. Charles Ephrussi – or at least the back of Charles’s head – enters art history.
9. EVEN EPHRUSSI FELL FOR IT
It is July and I’m in my studio in south London. It is down a track between a betting shop and a Caribbean takeaway, sandwiched in amongst car repairers. It’s a noisy area, but it is a beautiful space, with my wheels and kilns in a long and airy workshop and a room up some steep white stairs for my books. It is here that I display some of my finished work, groups of porcelain cylinders placed in lead-lined boxes at this moment; and it is here that I stack my piles of notes on early Impressionism and continue to write about the first collector of my netsuke.
It is a calm space, books and pots being good companions. And this is where I bring clients who want to commission something from me. It is very strange for me to be reading so much about Charles as a patron and his friendship with Renoir and Degas. It is not just the vertiginous descent from doing the commissioning to being commissioned. Or, indeed, from having paintings to writing about them. It is that I have been working long enough as a potter to know that being commissioned is an extremely delicate business. You are grateful, of course, but gratitude is different from feeling indebted. It is an interesting question for any artist: how long must you go on feeling grateful once someone has bought your work? It must have been especially complex given the youth of this patron – thirty-one in 1881 – and the age of some of the artists: Manet was forty-eight when he painted that bundle of asparagus. And, I think when I look at an image of a Pissarro that Charles owned, of poplar trees in a breeze, it must be especially delicate if your artistic credo is of freedom of expression, and spontaneity and lack of compromise.
Renoir was in need of money, and so Charles persuaded an aunt to sit for him; then he began work on Louise. It took a long summer of delicate negotiation between the lovers and the painter; Fanny, writing from the Chalet Ephrussi where Charles was staying, details the lengths to which he went to make sure it all came off successfully. It was quite a labour to bring about these two paintings. The first is of Louise’s elder daughter Irène, with reddish-golden hair, like her mother’s, falling around her shoulders. The second, impossibly saccharine portrait is of the younger girls, Alice and Elisabeth. The two girls also have their mother’s hair. They stand in front of a dark burgundy curtain, held open to reveal the salon beyond, holding hands, as if for reassurance – a confection of pink and blue ruffles and ribbons. Both pictures were exhibited at the Salon of 1881. I’m not sure how much Louise liked them. After all this work she was shockingly late in paying the modest charge of 1,500 francs. I find myself similarly embarrassed when I discover a cross note from Degas reminding Charles about a bill.
All this commissioned work for Renoir made some of Charles’s other painter friends mistrustful. Degas was especially severe: ‘Monsieur Renoir, you have no integrity. It is unacceptable that you paint to order. I gather that you now work for financiers, that you do the rounds with Monsieur Charles Ephrussi, next you’ll be exhibiting at the Mirlitons with Monsieur Bouguereau!’ This anxiety was compounded when Charles started buying pictures by other artists; this patron seemed to be moving
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