View from the box
This analysis of a celebrated masterpiece by Renoir depicting a couple at the theatre opens up a major theme in Impressionist art, writes Paul Bonaventura.
Paul Bonaventura, Monday, 25th August 2008
Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s La Loge (The Theatre Box) is a masterpiece of Impressionist painting and one of the most famous works in the Courtauld Gallery, London. Renoir at the Theatre, published in association with a small exhibition at the gallery earlier this year, unites the picture with the artist’s other paintings of elegant Parisians in their theatre boxes, and other depictions of the same subject by his Impressionist contemporaries. Their shared interest in the spectacle of modern society on public display is further contextualised by a rich array of period material from the world of caricature and the pages of satirical publications and fashion magazines.
The book’s content shuttles between John House’s reassessment of Renoir’s theatre-box paintings and a consideration of their wider cultural circumstances, with essays on the social spectacle of Paris’s theatres by Nancy Ireson and the boom in the Parisian fashion industry by Aileen Ribeiro. The entries on the individual paintings are by House, the Courtauld’s expert on French art in the second half of the 19th century, and two of the Gallery’s curators, Ernst Vegelin van Claerbergen and Barnaby Wright.
Renoir at the Theatre sets La Loge in the context of all six of the artist’s canvases of the subject from the early years of the movement. Like the other Impressionists, Renoir made a virtue of depicting the superficial aspect of visual experience, and this attention to surface achieves its perfect expression in the loge paintings, which focus on seeing and being seen. Renoir references the fundamentally voyeuristic inclination underpinning the Impressionist enterprise in La Loge itself by showing the woman’s male companion in the act of using binoculars. However, it is in Mary Cassatt’s painting At the Français, A Sketch, in which a woman watches the performance or gazes at the audience through opera glasses while she, in turn, is being inspected by a man with a lorgnette on the same balcony, that this impulse finds its ultimate embodiment.
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