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Painted circa 1917, Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Femme jouant aux cartes captures a rosy-cheeked young woman seated in a richly draped interior, occupied with a game of cards and a bouquet of flowers, christies.com reported.
The model is Dédée, the nickname of Andrée Heuschling. She arrived at Renoir’s home in Cagnes in 1915, replacing his longtime model Gabrielle Renard.
Gabrielle had married and was no longer available to sit for the artist, though she remained on good terms with him. Dédée’s vitality quickly charmed the household, inspiring Renoir to paint more than a hundred pictures of her.
Renoir’s son, the film director Jean Renoir, later recalled that the sixteen-year-old red-haired model possessed skin that “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, and cast over his father the revivifying spell of her joyous youth, according to christies.com.
Jean Renoir eventually cast her in several of his films under the name Catherine Hessling before marrying her. In this specific canvas, Dédée appears suspended outside time, her garments merging with the surrounding blooms in an overarching decorative harmony.
The warm palette relies heavily on pink, red, and gold, punctuated by strokes of blue and mauve. Art historian John House observed that Renoir was deliberately moving away from the fleeting or the contingent, away from the Impressionist preoccupation with the captured instant, towards a more timeless vision of woman, christies.com reported.
This pursuit of timeless volume and space deeply influenced the next generation of modern artists, including Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. Matisse declared that recorded time holds no nobler story, no more heroic, no more magnificent achievement than that of Renoir, according to christies.com.
Picasso experienced a “Renoirian crisis” after returning from Italy in April 1917. During this period, Picasso attempted to meet the artist, purchase his work, and copy his paintings to find an alternative to the fragmentation of Cubism. Picasso ultimately acquired seven works by the Impressionist master. Today, this portrait of Dédée stands as a vivid testament to the enduring magnetism of Renoir’s late career.
