Portrait of Henri Lerolle

By the mid-1890s the painters Renoir had once shown with as outsiders were being collected in earnest, and the man in this portrait was one of the people doing the collecting. Henri Lerolle was a painter himself, but he counted for more as a patron and a host. His Paris walls held work by Degas, Monet and Renoir, and the musical evenings he gave brought the young Claude Debussy and his own brother-in-law, the composer Ernest Chausson, into the same rooms as those painters. Renoir was close to the whole family. Around 1895 he painted Lerolle plainly, a fellow artist rather than a client, and two years later he would return to paint the Lerolle daughters at their piano.