O Camarote

Renoir showed this at the very first Impressionist exhibition, in Paris in the spring of 1874, the show that gave the movement its name and its bad reviews. The subject was pointedly modern, a fashionable couple in a theatre box, the woman leaning toward us in a black-and-white striped gown while the man behind lifts his opera glasses to scan the rest of the house, not the stage. It looks like a candid glimpse, but nothing here is accidental. The scene was arranged in Renoir's studio, with a model named Nini posing and the painter's own brother Edmond standing in as the gentleman. Some critics admired the colour, while others sniffed that the woman was overdressed and overly made-up, not quite respectable. It did not sell, and the next year a small dealer picked it up for 425 francs.