Madame Léon Clapisson

Leon Clapisson was a stockbroker who had begun buying Impressionists in 1879, and in 1882 he commissioned Renoir to paint his wife Valentine for 3,000 francs, twice what Renoir had been paid for a larger portrait a few years before. Renoir started outdoors in the garden of their villa at Neuilly, and the Clapissons refused the result. He wrote to a friend that the unfortunate portrait was not working, and that he spent his days carrying the canvas back inside. The version they accepted, finished in 1883, sets her against a flat background that was once a deep claret. Renoir used carmine lake for it, a red ground from cochineal insects, which the paint catalogues of the day already warned was unstable in light. It has faded to a grey mauve. Along the edges, where the frame kept the light off, the original colour is still there.