Maternity

Renoir's first son, Pierre, was born in March 1885, and in the months after, the painter kept returning to one domestic scene: Aline Charigot, the boy's mother and Renoir's companion, feeding the baby out in the open air. In several versions the child has stopped nursing to grab hold of his own bare foot, the distracted gesture of a real infant. What makes this more than a tender family picture is the moment in Renoir's own work. He had recently traveled to Italy, studied Raphael in Rome, and come home dissatisfied with the soft, dissolving edges of his Impressionist years. Here the outlines are firm and deliberate, the figures drawn as much as painted, in the harder, more linear manner he borrowed from the old master Ingres and worked through in the mid-1880s. He and Aline married five years after this, in 1890.