Lise with a Parasol
Renoir's model Lise Tréhot in a white dress at the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, dappled sunlight falling across her.
Chailly-en-Bière
The painting depicts a real landscape or cityscape. The precise viewpoint the artist used may be unknown, so the marker shows the general area.
Lise with a Parasol — at a glance
- Artist
- Auguste Renoir (1841–1919)
- Year
- 1867
- Movement
- Impressionism (early)
- Place
- The edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, near Chailly, France
- Viewpoint
- A woodland edge used as a studio backdrop — the forest survives; not a marked spot
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- c. 184 × 115 cm
- Now at
- Museum Folkwang, Essen
Overview
Lise with a Parasol is the picture that first won Auguste Renoir attention. Shown at the Salon of 1868, it is a life-size full-length of a young woman, Lise Tréhot, standing at the edge of a wood: a plain white muslin dress with a black sash, a black lace parasol held to shade her face, sunlight breaking through the leaves and scattering across the white fabric. It is oil on canvas, about 184 by 115 cm, and it hangs in the Museum Folkwang, Essen.
The story behind the painting
Scholarship Lise Tréhot was Renoir's model and companion in the late 1860s and appears in many of his early works. Renoir painted this in and around the forest of Fontainebleau, where he, Monet, Sisley and Bazille worked out of doors near the village of Chailly. The critics who noticed it at the 1868 Salon singled out the natural, un-posed effect of outdoor light on the dress.
Where was Lise with a Parasol painted?
Scholarship The setting is generally identified as the fringe of the forest of Fontainebleau, south-east of Paris, near Chailly-en-Bière — the woodland where the young Impressionists painted in the 1860s, and which is now a protected forest little changed. The picture is a figure study made against that woodland edge rather than a record of a marked, identifiable spot; the background is loosely brushed.
What is in the painting?
Lise stands almost frontally, weight on one leg, the open black parasol tilted over her shoulder so her face is in soft shade while her body catches the light. The white dress takes the full force of the sun on its right side and falls into cool blue-grey shadow on the left; a black sash marks her waist and its ends hang down the skirt. Behind her, out-of-focus green foliage and tree trunks.
Look closely
The tilted parasol
A black lace parasol shades her face while her body takes the sun.
The split dress
Warm sunlit cream on the right side, cool blue-grey shadow on the left — coloured shadow in the open air.
The black sash
A dark band at the waist with long ends hanging down the white skirt.
The blurred wood
Out-of-focus green foliage and trunks keep all the sharpness on the figure.
Analysis
Composition and light
A single standing figure against a soft green ground, built entirely around sunlight and shadow on a white dress.
Scholarship Renoir centres the figure and keeps the background vague, so the whole interest is the play of broken light through leaves across the dress — sunlit white on one side, blue-shadowed white on the other, with the shaded face beneath the parasol as a quiet centre.
Colour and light
White muslin split between warm sunlit cream and cool blue-grey shade, against green woodland.
Renoir paints the shadowed half of the dress in blues, lilacs and greys rather than dull grey, and the sunlit half in warm cream — an early, confident handling of coloured shadow in the open air.
History & provenance
The painting was acquired by the collector Karl Ernst Osthaus and is in the Museum Folkwang, Essen.
Sources
- Museum Folkwang, Essen — collection entry for Auguste Renoir, ‘Lise with a Parasol’ (‘Lise’, 1867; oil on canvas, c. 184 × 115 cm)
- Colin B. Bailey, ‘Renoir's Portraits’ literature on Lise Tréhot
Related paintings
More by Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Bal du moulin de la Galette
Luncheon of the Boating Party
Also connected to Chailly-en-Bière
