Man on a Staircase

In the spring of 2009 the Hermitage put this panel and its companion back on show after more than a year in the restoration studio. Under the old yellowed varnish, the restorer Valery Brovkin found that the dull dark blue behind the figure was full of flickers of light blue, red and green, and that the iron staircase was green with a bluish sheen. Renoir had painted the pair around 1876 for the stairwell of the Paris publisher Georges Charpentier and his wife Marguerite, who used him for almost anything, from family portraits to decorating dinner menus. The man's face has a touch of Charpentier's, but the museum reads him as a Parisian type rather than a portrait, and Renoir's younger brother Edmond is said to have posed. He leans on the curling rail with a cigarette raised, like a host waiting for his guests to come up.