Portrait of Renoir (1867): Art, History and Details

Portrait of Renoir (1867) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Frédéric Bazille (French, 1841–1870).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Frédéric Bazille painted this charming, poignant portrait of his close friend and fellow Impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir at a time when he was sharing his studio with Renoir and Claude Monet. Although Bazille played an important role in the early development of Impressionism, he is not as well-known as his colleagues due to his early death at age 28 while serving in the French army during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

Object facts

• Title: Portrait of Renoir
• Date: 1867
• Creator attribution: Frédéric Bazille (French, 1841–1870)
• Culture: France
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Unframed: 40.5 x 32.5 cm (15 15/16 x 12 13/16 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 2021.134

A detail from the museum

Born to a wealthy family in Montpellier, France, Bazille came to Paris to study medicine and provided crucial financial support to his friends Claude Monet and Pierre-August Renoir.

Collection credit

Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Schulman, Michel, and Frédéric Bazille. Frédéric Bazille: 1841-1870 : catalogue raisonné, peintures, dessins, pastels, aquarelles : sa vie, son œuvre, sa correspondance. Paris: Editions de l'amateur, 1995.
• Jeancolas, Claude. Le groupe des Batignolles: les impressionnistes avant l'impressionnisme. Paris: FVW, 2014.
• Robinson, William H. “Portrait of Renoir.” Cleveland Art: Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine 61, no. 4 (Fall 2021): 27-28.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.