The Theatre Box (La Loge)

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The Theatre Box (La Loge): Pierre-Auguste Renoir

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Pierre-Auguste Renoir Oil Painting - The Theatre Box (La Loge)

Keywords: Theatre, Box, Loge

Work Overview: The Theatre Box
French: La Loge
Artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Year 1874
Medium oil on canvas
Dimensions 80 cm × 63.5 cm (31 in × 25.0 in)
Location Courtauld Gallery, London
Estimate 2,500,000 — 3,500,000 GBP
LOT SOLD. 7,412,500 GBP (Hammer Price with Buyer's Premium)

La Loge (The Theatre Box) is an 1874 oil painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. It is part of the collection at Courtauld Institute of Art in London.

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Why do people go to opening nights at the theatre, opera, and art galleries? The answer is: to see and to be seen. That, in a nutshell, is what is happening in Pierre-Auguste Renoir's magical painting La Loge ("The Box at the Theatre"), the subject of a small, old-fashioned "art-in-context" exhibition, focusing on this Impressionist masterpiece from the permanent collection at the Courtauld Gallery.
Painted in 1874 and shown in the first Impressionist exhibition of that year, it depicts a fashionable couple seated in the best seats at the theatre or opera. We can't know whether the curtain has already gone up because at this date house lights were not dimmed. We viewers see the anonymous man and woman from the same level across the amphitheatre and in close up, implying that we are seated opposite and watching them through opera glasses.
Two things are happening simultaneously: one active, the other passive. The man raises his binoculars to look to the upper balconies, presumably to get a closer look at a beautiful woman. But his wife (or more probably mistress) sits perfectly still, her opera glasses in one gloved hand and her fan and handkerchief the other, with a slight smile playing on her lips.
Her gaze is unfocused, as though she is lost in thought, unaware of being observed. This last detail is important because it reinforces the idea that we are watching her from a distance through binoculars. Since she isn't conscious of our interest, we can feast our eyes on her slightly blowsy beauty, which is set off to perfection by her ravishing dress, jewels and flowers.
Parisian cartoonists had long been having fun with the subject of romantic and social carryings-on in boxes at the theatre, but Renoir was among the first artists to treat the theme, which he saw as part of the spectacle of modern life in the big city. When we look at the picture, he wants us to be intrigued by this pair and to ask ourselves who they are and what is happening between them.
Though Renoir leaves the woman's precise social status unclear, her heavy use of cosmetics and deep décolletage suggests that she is une demi-mondaine. That he was acutely sensitive to social nuances of this sort is suggested by another painting in this show in which a lady who is plainly from the highest level of society is shown in a box at the opera wearing a demure black evening gown without jewels or face paint.
The woman in La Loge is not in her first youth. Her lover or protector has begun to look at other women, and she may not have much time left to find his successor. If (as I believe) she is meant to be seen as a courtesan, then her passive demeanour has a purpose - she is signalling her availability by displaying her charms for all to see, well aware that the eyes of every man in the theatre are on her.
And how could you not look at such a dazzling creature? As Aileen Ribeiro explains in her informative catalogue essay, the woman in the picture is dressed in the height of fashion in a silk gown of 18th-century inspiration called a polonaise. On the back of her chair we catch a glimpse of her ermine wrap, and she wears flowers in her hair and a corsage inserted into a tiny vial of water at her bosom. It is difficult to tell whether those are diamonds in her ears and pearls around her neck because Renoir handles paint so freely that they could just as easily be glass.
La Loge is candy floss, confectionery in paint. Renoir uses rivers of flowing black paint to create the bold stripes running down the silk dress, and the white of that dress isn't really white but white mixed with light blue, so that the overall effect is not, as it technically should be, a black and white painting, but a blur of blues and pinks with little zings of yellow-gold.
For all his virtuosity here, from a technical point of view Renoir is the most uneven of all the Impressionists. He painted too much and too quickly and didn't destroy works that really should never have seen the light of day.
Even in this small exhibition, the quality of his painting lurches wildly between pictures that Renoir expended time and thought on, and those he didn't. Compare La Loge, for example, with a small scale replica hanging next to it. It is so slapdash in its execution that the surface looks like a bar of soap that's melted in the bath.
Mary Cassatt is a much more consistent painter, who was also attracted to the subject of the theatre. Indeed, her At the Français, a Sketch looks to me like a direct response to Renoir's La Loge. For here a woman (who may be a widow because she is dressed entirely in black) is seen in a theatre box on her own, assertively using her opera glasses to see what's happening on the stage, unaware that she is the object of intense scrutiny by a man in a distant box, who is so frantic to get a good look at her that he leans out over the ledge of the box with his binoculars glued to his eyes.
Cassatt contrasts her intelligence and dignity with behaviour that is not just boorish but subtly threatening because, unlike the woman in La Loge, she is genuinely unconscious of what is happening.
I love exhibitions that put a single picture in context. This one, with a catalogue and essays by Ernst Vegelin van Claerbergen, Barnaby Wright, John House, Nancy Ireson and Aileen Ribeiro gave me new respect for a painter I often think of as all eye and no brain.

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“… the kind of exhibition that The Courtauld Gallery does to perfection. It takes an Impressionist masterpiece from its own incomparable collections and gives it context.”
The Daily Telegraph

“Another of those close-focus shows this gallery does so well. It brings together Renoir’s La Loge with other treatments by him and contemporaries of people in theatre boxes. Recommended.”
Sunday Times

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s La Loge (The Theatre Box), 1874, is a masterpiece of Impressionist painting and one of the most famous works in the Courtauld Gallery’s collection. The exhibition unites this exceptional picture with Renoir’s other paintings of elegant Parisians on display in their loges.

It also includes other depictions of the theatre box by his Impressionist contemporaries, with important works by Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas and others borrowed from international collections. Their shared interest in the spectacle of modern society at the theatre is further explored through a rich array of printed material such as contemporary fashion magazines and caricatures.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s La Loge (The Theatre Box), 1874, is one of the masterpieces of Impressionism and a major highlight of The Courtauld Gallery’s collection. Its depiction of an elegant couple on display in a loge, or box at the theatre, epitomises the Impressionists’ interest in the spectacle of modern life. In celebration of The Courtauld Institute of Art’s 75th anniversary the exhibition Renoir at the Theatre: Looking at ‘La Loge’, on view from 21 February to 25 May 2008, unites La Loge for the first time with Renoir’s other treatments of the subject and logepaintings by contemporaries, including Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas. Concentrating on the early years of Impressionism during the 1870s, the exhibition explores how these artists used the loge to capture the excitement and changing nature of fashionable Parisian society.

La Loge was Renoir’s principal exhibit in the first Impressionist exhibition in Paris in 1874. The complexity of its subject matter and its virtuoso technique helped to establish the artist’s reputation as one of the leaders of this radical new movement in French art. Renoir’s brother Edmond and Nini Lopez, a model from Montmartre known as ‘Fish-face’, posed for this ambitious composition. At the heart of the painting is the complex play of gazes enacted by these two figures seated in a theatre box. The elegantly dressed woman lowers her opera glasses, revealing herself to admirers in the theatre, whilst her male companion trains his gaze elsewhere in the audience. In turning away from the performance, Renoir focused instead upon the theatre as a social stage where status and relationships were on public display.

Theatre in Paris was a rapidly expanding industry during the 19th century, dominating the cultural life of the city. At the time of La Loge it was estimated that over 200,000 theatre tickets were sold every week in Paris. Theatres ranged from the popular variety act venues to the fashionable elegance of the great opera houses. The burgeoning wealth of the middle classes meant that the logesof the premier theatres were no longer the preserve of high society. From the 1830s onwards celebrated caricaturists such as Honoré Daumier (1808-79) and Paul Gavarni (1804-66) seized upon the theatre box as a rich theme for social satire. By the 1870s leering men with over-sized opera glasses, middle-aged women struggling to maintain their appeal, fathers parading their elegant daughters, and gauche visitors from the provinces had emerged as stock types in weekly magazines such as Le Petit Journal pour Rire. The interest in the theatre, and particularly the loge as a space for social display, was also harnessed by the booming fashion industry which catered to the aspirational and newly wealthy middle class. Lavishly produced journals such as La Mode Illustrée included fine hand-coloured engravings showing the latest fashions modelled by elegant ladies in theatre boxes . A rich selection of this little-known graphic material from contemporary Parisian journals is also on display in the exhibition.

As the first artist to make the theatre box a subject for modern painting, Renoir drew on this popular visual culture, which would also have shaped the context in which his paintings were viewed. At the time of the first Impressionist exhibition Renoir had been particularly concerned with the loge and, in addition to the Courtauld picture, produced two smaller canvases, both of which will be displayed in the exhibition. Renoir returned to the theme in two later canvases. At the Theatre, 1876-7, (National Gallery, London) takes an oblique view of a theatre box, setting a young woman and her companion off against the blurred mass of the audience. At the Concert, 1880, (The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown) is one of Renoir’s most monumental treatments of the subject. This work started as a portrait of the family of Monsieur Turquet, the under-secretary of state for the fine arts, posed in their opulent theatre box. Renoir subsequently altered the composition, painting out his male patron who was originally shown in the background, and transforming the image into a fashionable but anonymous genre scene.

A major highlight of the exhibition is a small version of the Courtauld Gallery’s La Loge which was recently sold at auction in London and was one of the sensations of the sale, doubling its pre-auction estimate. Renoir seems to have painted it in 1874, perhaps in response to the critical success of the larger picture at exhibition, but this is the first time the two have been exhibited together.

Renoir at the Theatre will be the first exhibition to focus on this group of works. It will also display a number of important logepaintings by Renoir’s Impressionist contemporaries to explore alternative ways in which this subject was approached. Two major paintings by Mary Cassatt present contrasting views of women in their theatre boxes. Woman with a Pearl Necklace, 1879, (Philadelphia Museum of Art) shows a beautifully dressed woman in the sparkling interior of a theatre box as the passive recipient of admiring gazes . In the Loge,1878, is a very different representation where a soberly attired woman assertively surveys the theatre through her opera glasses as an active participant in the play of gazes that surrounds her . In Degas’s treatments of the subject the artist explores different ‘snapshot’ viewpoints of the loge, as if capturing a fleeting glance. This is epitomised by his ambitious pastel La Loge, 1880 (private collection), in which the viewer is placed in the theatre stalls looking up at the head of a lone woman who emerges from the gilded surround of a loge, her pale face caught momentarily in a pool of light.

Renoir’s La Loge received enthusiastic reviews when it was first exhibited in Paris in 1874 and later that year it travelled to London for an exhibition organised by his dealer Durand-Ruel, making it one of the first major Impressionist paintings to be shown in this country. However, the painting did not sell at either exhibition and was bought inexpensively the following year by the minor dealer ‘Père’ Martin for 425 francs, providing Renoir with much needed funds to pay the rent. When Samuel Courtauld purchased it in 1925 the status of the painting had risen considerably along with the price which was now £22,600 and one of Courtauld’s most expensive acquisitions. Today La Loge is celebrated as one of the most important paintings of the Impressionist movement. This exhibition will cast new light upon Renoir’s masterpiece and the spectacle of the Parisian theatre which it captures.

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Renoir’s brother Edmond and Nini Lopez, a model known as ‘fish-face’, posed for this painting of a box at the theatre. He uses his opera glasses to scan the audience; she holds hers in her hand, her gaze slightly unfocused as if she knows she is being looked at.

La Loge was included in the Impressionists’ first group exhibition in 1874. Critics were divided. One used the woman as a warning of the dangerous temptations of the fashion industry; another praised her elegance. (Permanent collection label)

This masterpiece, painted when Renoir was thirty-three and shown in the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874, can be regarded simply as a glimpse of contemporary life but is in a sense portraiture also. Renoir's brother Edmond posed for the man, the girl was a well-known Montmartre model nicknamed `Nini gueule en raie'.

Renoir had already been working in close accord with Monet at La Grenouillère but in this instance made no special effort at Impressionist innovation, such as might convey the impression of a theatre by the treatment of light. Nor did he have any scruple about using black, on which Impressionist theory frowned, deriving its utmost density from Edmond's evening dress and opera-glasses and Nini's righly stripped attire. All his appreciation of feminine charm of feature appears in the eyes, the mobile mouth and delicate skin of his female model contrasted with the countenance of Edmond in shadow. In spite of the beauty and luxurious character of the painting it found no buyer and Renoir by his own account was only too glad to dispose of it to the dealer known as le père Martin for 425 francs. He was adamant in not taking less as this was the exact amount needed to pay rent due and he had no other resource. But Nini of La Loge was the first of the long series of portraits that Renoir was able to invest with an inimitable charm.

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Renoir's splendid La Loge of 1874 is a smaller version of the iconic oil of the same date and title (fig. 1), now in the collection of the Courtauld Institute Galleries in London. Capturing the spirit that defined the avant-garde movement, La Loge has become one of the images most commonly associated with Impressionist painting. The scene depicts a bourgeois couple seated in their box at the Paris opera house, where the main attraction is dependant on one's point of view. In this composition, Renoir presents us with a female figure who looks directly at the viewer, while her male companion looks up towards another member of the audience rather than down towards the stage. The act of looking and being looked at were central concerns to the Impressionists as they documented scenes of modern life, and at the opera and ballet both the performers and audience were part of the pageantry.

Writing about the subject of theatre in Impressionist painting, Judith A. Barter observed: 'Of all the arts in nineteenth-century France, theatre was the most popular. To many it seemed that all of Paris lived at the theatre. Nowhere else could one experience such a lavish display of light, color, ornament, extravagance, and society. By far the most opulent theatre in Paris was the Opéra [fig. 3]' (J. A. Barter, in Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman (exhibition catalogue), The Art Institute of Chicago, 1998, p. 46). Renoir and his contemporaries including Degas and Mary Cassatt (fig. 2) were fascinated with the urban spectacle and found in theatre a rich source of inspiration. The loge or theatre box was at the time only affordable to the well-to-do members of society, and women would always sit at the front of the loge, with their male companion in the back. Unlike today, the lights during a performance were never completely extinguished, allowing the spectators not only to read a libretto, but also to watch other members of the audience.
Renoir's models for this composition were his brother Edmond Renoir and Nini, an attractive young model from Montmartre who posed for the aritst on several occasions. Whereas in other compositions Edmond played a prominent role, here Renoir relegates him to the shadows of the loge and illuminates his elegant companion. The bejewelled Nini, with her plunging neckline and lacy décolletage, is the embodiment of the modern parisienne, unperturbed in her dual role as spectator and spectacle. The richness of the pigment, primarily in the velvety stole of the female figure, is a striking and deliberate contrast to the pastel tones that are more commonly found in early Impressionist pictures. Amidst the darkness Nini appears to be illuminated by a warm golden glow, as indeed she would have been by the gas lamps of the opera.

The larger version of La Loge, in the collection of the Courtauld Institute Galleries in London, was included in the first Impressionist exhibition in Paris in 1874. A year later, Renoir persuaded his other Impressionist colleagues to auction some of their work at a one-day event at the Hôtel Drouot. At that auction, the present work was sold to the collector Jean Dollfus, who kept it in his collection until 1912. It was eventually acquired by Robert Treat Paine II (1861-1943), the distinguished collector from Massachusetts. Paine was a descendant of Robert Treat Paine (1731-1814), a signatory of the Declaration of Independence, and other members of his family were celebrated philanthropists and social reformers. Robert Treat Paine II built an outstanding collection of Impressionist and Modern masterpieces, including works by Monet, Degas and van Gogh, which were bequeathed to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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"Beauty," said Stendhal, "is the promise of happiness." To Renoir, a simpler man, the words are synonymous: beauty is happiness. The promise and the realization are one. This picture is a hymn to the beauty of woman. It is an image of health, an exaltation of maturity, an idealization of togetherness. With what tact Renoir has placed the man in the background, covered half his face, and subdued the detail with which he is rendered! The woman is offered for full and rapturous gaze; her face and body and costume are more flowerlike than the blossoms in her hair and corsage. She is a bouquet herself.

The man is Renoir's younger brother, Edmond, who worshiped him. The woman is Nini Lopez, one of Renoir's models at the time, "with a profile of antique purity." This goddess chose to leave Renoir shortly after and marry a tenth-rate actor.

"Black," said Renoir, "is the queen of colors." A typically Renoir choice, it plays throughout, lustrous, patterned, varied, uniting the man and the woman. The alternate stripes stream down from the woman's bosom and face, like a radiation from the glamorous flesh.

The picture is full of Renoir's best qualities. Every aspect, by plan or by instinct, is harmoniously developed for visual delight. Take, for example, the pairing of things: the man and the woman; the gold of her bracelet and the opera glasses; the double gold stripe below her hand; the two pink blossom clusters on her bodice; the two vertical stripes in the light drapery; the twin pinks of her face and the flower above it; the warm spots of his face and gloved hand; even, as a final flourish, the two splashes of black on the ermine at the edge of his shirtfront.

Again and again these paired attractions are related through short lower-right-to-upper-left diagonals; con-trasting diagonals form a major movement upward and into the picture through the positions of the railing, the woman, and the man.

One's eye keeps wandering back to that lovely face, its doll-like perfection set off by playful wisps of hair which keep this beauty from cloying. If painting can be compared J with music, surely this canvas is Mozartian.

Depicting an elegant-looking couple sitting in an elevated theater box, this tribute to Parisian modern life was also the artist's principal contribution to the very first Impressionist exhibition of the same year, and it was met with much acclaim. The theater played a prominent role in Parisian life, from opera to the popular variety shows featuring can-can dancers, and depictions of the theater typically focused on the performers. However, much of the allure of the theater for the middle class was the opportunity to see and be seen, and La Loge deftly captures that complex interplay of gazes. The woman lowers her opera glasses, implying that she is no longer watching the events on stage and allowing her face to be seen. Meanwhile, the man (Renoir's brother Edmond) leans back in his seat, perusing the theatergoers in other balconies through his glasses. With his delicate and masterful rendering of his model's lacy bodice, glinting jewelry, and floral accoutrements, Renoir painted a canvas about seeing that spoke to his own keen eye.

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