Renoir at the Theatre: Looking at La Loge

Renoir at the Theatre: Looking at La Loge

21 February to 25 May 2008
Courtauld Institute Art Gallery

In 1837 a cartoon by the painter Honoré Daumier (1808-74), entitled La Loge Grille (The Grated Box) appeared in Le Charivari , an illustrated French newspaper of the time that published scenes and sketches from contemporary life. In the image we see a comic little man peeping through a kind of grating. We can’t see what he is looking at; all our attention is focused on him. Nearly twenty years later Daumier painted La Loge (The Theatre Box, 1854-56), the image being of   plainly-dressed people seated in a theatre box. Apart from being seated together there is no apparent connection between them. Again, our focus is on the group but we cannot see what they are looking at.

In 1860 Constantin Guys painted three watercolours, La Loge, Deux Couples Dans Une Loge and A L’Opera. Again, we are looking at the subjects and cannot see what they are looking at. In 1874 the impressionist artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1920) painted his definitive La Loge (The Theatre Box). And again we are looking at the subject of the painting who is looking at someone or something else. Café-Concert Au Theatre in 1876 – 7, followed this. In 1878 fellow impressionist Mary Cassatt painted At The Français, a painting of a woman in a theatre box looking through her opera glasses while from another box, we see a man looking through his glasses at her. In 1879 Cassatt painted Femme Dans Une Loge (Woman at the theatre with a pearl necklace) the subject being a sumptuously dressed female caught in the glare of theatre lights.

It was as if the obscure sketches by Daumier nearly half a century earlier had taken root and blossomed into this curious sub-genre of people looking and being looked at in places of entertainment. Now all these paintings and many more are gathered together in Renoir at the Theatre: Looking at La Loge in the Courtauld Gallery. But what was this cult of looking and seeing? And why did it take hold when and where it did?

The nineteenth century saw important social changes. The increasing wealth of the middle classes led to a proliferation of public spaces; places that ordinary people with money and leisure could access and enjoy. These places included public parks and gardens, restaurants, cafes, department stores and, of course, theatres. Importantly women could access these places without any slight on their respectability – something we take for granted today. This intermingling of class and gender gave rise to new art forms. The writer was no longer a spinner of tales but a ‘social observer’, the most notable in England being Charles Dickens and paralleled in France by the novelist Victor Hugo and the poet and essayist, Charles Baudelaire.

In his 1863 essay, The Painter of Modern Life, Baudelaire laid out the significance of the flaneur, the man unseen in the crowd, observing life and the lives of people of all kinds. In this essay he refers to the watercolours by Constantin Guys. These social and artistic changes happened in tandem with advances in optical technology. The earliest cameras had been on the market since the 1840’s. The art of the painter looked like becoming obsolete but for one important consideration; early photography was a slow business. The plates had to be exposed for several minutes and the photographers’ equipment was no less cumbersome than the artists’ easel and paints. While this situation lasted – a generation at least – a deft artist could rival a photographer in producing a snapshot type painting, a moment in time captured brilliantly by a series of brushstrokes.

And the public were given a starring role to play in the midst of this proliferation of optical devices, social observers and painters; they wanted to be seen. With mass produced clothing available in the stores, fashion was now within reach of anyone with money to spend. And it was also possible to buy a place in la loge, the best box in the theatre. Renoir’s woman, the model Nini Lopez, is dressed in a striped, silk gown, the height of fashion in the 1870’s. For ornamentation she has three pink roses – costly items in those times – and strings of pearls. The roses are a perfect foil to the coppery tones of her hair and milky-white skin. A fur stole, white gloves and opera glasses complete her ensemble. The man seated in the background is just as fashionably dressed and is looking through his own opera glasses. Curator of the exhibition, Professor John House, explained that theatre lights were kept on during performances, a practice that cannot have heightened the presence of the performers. In short, going to the theatre was as much about being seen as going to see.

We may raise our brows in surprise and wonder at the self-consciousness of our nineteenth-century forbears. But the culture of seeing and being seen is omnipresent today. Advances in technology have brought us the movie camera, imaging mobile phones, web cams, CCTV and television. The most popular TV shows are the ‘reality’ variety, for which contenders flock to take part. Today we are either looking or being looked at. What has changed is the nature of the onlooker. Unless the subject is a ‘celebrity’, observation is now a mostly furtive business, mainly for the purpose of law-enforcement. Where this cult of seeing will take us next, we cannot tell.

In the meantime, this exhibition is a must for observers of human nature and students of Renoir. All his ‘theatre’ paintings are assembled, including a miniature of La Loge, recently auctioned at Sotheby’s for an undisclosed sum. I say again, do not miss this feast of nineteenth-century wonder, humour and glamour.

Copyright © Artyfacts 2008