Victor Chocquet (1821-1891)

When Renoir painted this in 1875, Paris was rebuilding its city hall. The Hôtel de Ville had burned in May 1871, in the last days of the Commune, and the painted rooms inside went with it, including a salon the Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix had decorated in the early 1850s. Above its doors and windows ran 11 arched scenes from the life of Hercules. The sitter, Victor Chocquet, was a civil servant who collected Delacroix with real devotion, and he owned one of the painter's sketches for those arches. Renoir put it behind his head. You can see the curve of its gilt frame and a pale figure in the arch at the upper right. Chocquet saw Renoir as an heir to Delacroix's colour, and the sketch in the background returns the compliment. Everything else Renoir kept informal, a loose jacket and the sitter's hands folded over the lower left corner of the canvas.