If we compare a photograph of Lise (see page 42) with paintings for which she modelled, we realize that Renoir always greatly transforms her appearance. In all Renoir’s thousands of paintings of people, he always idealizes according to the model of beauty established by artists of the past, from Greek statues through Raphael, Rubens and Ingres. These artists improved the appearance of people to make them look more beautiful, healthy and happy. Even though Renoir always transformed the person before him, he wanted to paint from a model because he enjoyed the sociability and inspiration. Lise was not only Renoir’s model but also his lover and muse. She inspired his first amorous painting, Lise and Sisley, 1868, which has been wrongly titled The Sisley Couple.98
In a letter to Bazille, of September or October 1869, Renoir called the painting ‘Lise and Sisley’, writing: ‘I exhibited Lise and Sisley at Carpentier’s.’99 Marie-Charles-Édouard Carpentier, whose store was at 8 boulevard Montmartre, was Renoir’s paint dealer and framer.100 Renoir hoped to sell the painting for 100 francs, which was the current price for large photographs by the fashionable photographers Disdéri and Adam-Salomon.101 Unfortunately, Lise and Sisley did not sell at the time (see page 85).
It is tempting to surmise that Renoir’s infatuation with Lise led him to begin painting the pursuit of love, a theme that, among the Impressionists, was unique to him. Renoir’s romantic feelings for Lise no doubt enhanced the passion that he put into all the paintings for which she modelled. Lise and Sisley is the first of many paintings of romance in modern Paris where handsome, gallant men pursue beautiful, fashionably dressed young women. Here, as in later paintings, love is conveyed through glance, gesture and posture. This amorous subject matter did reflect Renoir’s life and the things he did or would have liked to have done. When Renoir was a young healthy, sociable bachelor, he created his most innovative social scenes in Paris and its suburbs. Two years later, in 1870, Lise posed for The Promenade, Renoir’s first amorous work in his new Impressionist style.102 By painting the pursuit of love, Renoir was following Boucher, Fragonard and Watteau, as well as his idol, Rubens. In these romantic works, his male friends stood in for Renoir alongside Lise. Besides this romantic subject matter, Lise also posed for several paintings of nudes and of modern women alone.
Since Renoir was earning little money from his painting and there is no documentation, it is unclear whether he paid modelling fees to Lise. However, besides posing for Renoir, Lise earned money modelling for Bazille. The link between Renoir, Bazille and Lise is confirmed in a letter that Renoir wrote to Bazille in 1869: ‘Lise saw your letter.’103 That same year, Lise posed for Bazille’s The Card Player, Young Woman with Lowered Eyes, Woman with Striped Dress and Moorish Woman; in 1870, she posed for Bazille’s La Toilette.104
When Bazille used Lise as a model for Moorish Woman in 1869, he may have inspired Renoir in his seductive Algerian Odalisque of 1870. The latter is part of a pair with a nude painting of Lise, Nymph at the Stream, 1869–70 (see page 85).105 Renoir’s pair of wide horizontal panels calls to mind Goya’s Dressed Maja and Nude Maja. Unlike the Goyas, however, Renoir’s two figures are in mirrored poses. Around the time that Lise modelled for Nymph at the Stream, she had given birth to one of Renoir’s children, and by the time of the Algerian Odalisque, she was pregnant with his second child.
In this time of primitive contraception and in a Catholic country with no legal abortions, it was risky for any unmarried woman to have an affair. A year after Renoir met Lise, Sisley and Monet had illegitimate children with their models who were also their mistresses. Sisley’s model and companion, Marie-Adélaïde-Eugénie Lescouezec, gave birth to a son, Pierre Sisley, on 17 June 1867.106 Two months later, on 8 August, Monet’s model and companion, Camille Doncieux, gave birth to their son Jean (as noted earlier). Since neither couple was married, neither child was legitimate. However, at their sons’ births, Sisley and Monet recognized their children and gave them their last names; in so doing, they legally agreed to support them. As expected, each artist later married his mistress, thereby legitimizing his child.107
Having illegitimate children in full view rather than hiding them away as bourgeois people did was considered bohemian and undignified. The parents of both Sisley and Monet were unsympathetic to their sons’ circumstances. Furthermore, Bazille, who helped Monet financially, was no doubt displeased with Monet’s predicament. Bazille was from a Protestant bourgeois family and is not known to have ever had a mistress.108 Lise also became Bazille’s model but it is presumed that they did not have a sexual relationship.
A year after the births of Pierre Sisley and Jean Monet, the mistresses of both Renoir and Jules Le Coeur – Lise and Clémence – became pregnant at around the same time. Jules Le Coeur was happy with this; his wife and son had died six years earlier. However, Renoir had immediate concerns because of his precarious finances. He knew that Bazille would disapprove and he worried that Bazille might withdraw his financial assistance. While most people knew Lise only as Renoir’s model, Bazille knew that she was also Renoir’s secret lover. This prompted Renoir to write to Bazille a month before Lise was to give birth: ‘I am at Ville-d’Avray…. and if you have some money, it would be good if you would send it to me immediately, so that you won’t spend it. You needn’t worry about me since I have neither wife nor child and am not ready to have either one or the other.’109 By asserting his lack of wife or child, Renoir was reassuring Bazille, who was helping him with money, that he was not planning to follow the route taken two years earlier by Monet, who, after he had a child, became more demanding in his monetary requests to Bazille.110 Renoir wanted Bazille to know that he was not going to become a similar burden even though, secretly, he was about to become a father.
In this situation, Renoir’s lower-class background restricted his options even if he loved Lise as much as Monet loved Camille. The middle-class Monet felt entitled to have a child and future wife, but the lower-class Renoir was too dependent on his friends’ support to feel enabled to have a wife and child in the foreseeable future. Nonetheless, Renoir continued his relationship with Lise but decided not to proceed as a family with her and their child, and indeed to keep the relationship secret. Renoir’s family never learned of his children with Lise, just as Jules’s family never knew about Clémence and their child. As I described in the Introduction, it was the accidental discovery of unpublished Renoir letters in 2002, by Jean-Claude Gélineau, that revealed the existence of Renoir’s two illegitimate children with Lise.111 During Renoir’s lifetime, the only outside people who definitely knew about Lise’s pregnancy were Bazille and Le Coeur, though Sisley, Monet and Maître could have known as well.
Over the summer of 1868, with both Clémence and Lise pregnant, Jules left Marlotte and rented an apartment in a little building at 38 rue de Saint-Cloud in Ville-d’Avray, near Louveciennes, 20 kilometres (12½ miles) west of Paris. There he stayed with Clémence and was often joined by Renoir and Lise. By mid-September, the two couples were awaiting two births. On sequential days, 14 and 15 September 1868, in the same apartment, Clémence gave birth to Jules’s daughter, Françoise Le Coeur, at four o’clock in the afternoon and Lise gave birth to Renoir’s son, Pierre Tréhot, the next morning at ten thirty.112 However, Le Coeur’s way of handling a secret family differed from Renoir’s, since Le Coeur had the money and desire to support Clémence and their daughter, even though he refused to legitimize their family; he never married Clémence. Their daughter’s birth certificate says that she was recognized by Le Coeur when he gave her his last name. Clémence, nevertheless, did not recognize her child at the birth. On the birth certificate, Clémence did not give her real last name, Tréhot, but invented a surname: ‘Demoiselle Clémence Élisabeth Angélique Lucenay.’113 She falsified her name because she feared ruining her future marriage prospects as a single woman with a child. However, ten years later, aged thirty-five, Clémence gave up the hope of finding a husband and did legally register herself as Françoise’s mother.114 It appears th
at Jules Le Coeur never told his family about Clémence or Françoise and neither of their names appeared in his correspondence.115 When Françoise was fourteen, in 1882, Jules died and afterwards Clémence called herself ‘widow Le Coeur’.116
The story of Renoir, Lise and infant Pierre Tréhot is far different. Neither Renoir, then aged twenty-seven, nor Lise, aged twenty, had the money to bring up their son. It appears that Lise did not want to be burdened with an infant and his impoverished father. Probably, Renoir felt that taking financial responsibility for a child would jeopardize his painting career and would disappoint Bazille and other bourgeois friends who were supporting him. Renoir and Lise, unable to keep the child, gave him away. On Pierre Tréhot’s birth certificate, Renoir did not register as the father; the document says: ‘father of the infant is unknown’. However, Renoir and Le Coeur signed the birth certificate as witnesses at Pierre’s birth: ‘The witnesses were Messrs. Pierre Auguste Renoir, artist-painter, 27 years old, living in Paris, 9 rue de la Paix in the Batignolles, friend of the mother of the child.’ Thus Renoir confirmed that he was living with Bazille at the time. The other registered witness was Jules Le Coeur, described on the birth certificate as: ‘a thirty-six-year-old artist Painter’ who is ‘not a relative of the mother’.117 Despite the fact that they were giving him away, Lise and Renoir decided to name the child Pierre Tréhot after Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
Infant Pierre may well have been taken 6.5 kilometres (4 miles) away to Paris’s Foundling Hospital.118 Here wetnurses from rural areas regularly came to take infants as foster children; the state paid the wetnurses until the children were aged twelve. Unfortunately, half of all illegitimate children who were separated from their mothers died during their first year. This could have been Pierre’s plight. There are no documents or letters about Pierre Tréhot beyond his birth certificate.
After giving away their son, Lise continued to be Renoir’s model and lover. Almost two years later, on 21 July 1870, two days after France had declared war on Prussia, Lise gave birth to another of Renoir’s children. Her delivery took place in a municipal health establishment, which is today’s Fernand Widal Hospital, in Paris’s tenth arrondissement at 200 rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis. At the time, Renoir, who had fulfilled his military training, was awaiting assignment in the cavalry. It is not known if he was present at the birth. He was living within walking distance of the hospital at Maître’s Paris apartment on rue Taranne, in the sixth arrondissement. The birth certificate indicates that Lise was also living not far from the hospital, at 26 rue du Colysée (now Colisée) in the eighth arrondissement.119 This time, Lise gave birth to a girl and named her Jeanne Marguerite Tréhot. Since Renoir’s mother’s name was Marguerite, it seems likely that Renoir had suggested Jeanne’s middle name. On the birth certificate, Lise Tréhot’s name is given as the mother, with no mention of the father. The three other people recorded on the certificate were employees of the public hospital. As an adult, Jeanne looked remarkably similar to both her parents, as may be seen in photographs of the time (see pages 42–43). Two weeks later, Bazille was painting near his Montpellier home and jokingly wrote to Maître: ‘Give me news of our friends…. Renoir must be about to become a father, will he give birth to a painting?’120 Bazille’s allusion to birth here, as well as Renoir’s allusion to birth two years earlier in his letter to Bazille, suggests that Maître and Bazille were aware of both of Renoir’s illegitimate children with Lise. It is probable that Jules Le Coeur also knew.
Renoir (in a photograph he gave to Monet), c. 1870. Musée Marmottan, Paris. Photographer unknown
Lise Tréhot, 16 years old, 1864. Collection Chéreau, Paris. Photographer unknown
Jeanne Marguerite Tréhot, c. 1910. Photo by Charles Gallot, Paris
As with Pierre Tréhot’s birth in 1868, now, with Jeanne Marguerite’s in 1870, neither Lise nor Renoir had the financial means or desire to bring up their newborn. On Jeanne’s birth certificate, Lise states she is ‘without profession’ while she had said ‘dressmaker’ on Pierre’s birth certificate.121 Since all girls in France learned to sew in school, being a seamstress or dressmaker was a popular means of employment. In neither birth certificate was Lise comfortable declaring that she was a model, since that type of work was considered only a step up from prostitution.
It is most likely that before Lise left the hospital she had given away newborn Jeanne to Augustine Marie Clémentine Blanchet (née Vannier, aged twenty-eight), a professional foster mother and wetnurse whom Renoir had probably found.122 There is no evidence that Lise ever contacted Jeanne’s foster family, nor did she send money for her support.123 Lise wanted to marry a rich man so that she and her future children could have comfortable middle-class or upper-class lives. If she had agreed to become the mother of either Pierre or Jeanne, her chances of finding such a husband would have been ruined by having illegitimate children. Yet in 1870, Lise was still willing to continue her relationship with Renoir, in hope that he might become rich and famous – but so far his prospects seemed bleak.
Renoir’s reaction to the birth of his second child was different from Lise’s – because he was a man and because of his personal background. As a man, even though he came from a poor background and was still poor when Jeanne was born, it was possible that he could become rich. His generous and loving decision to become Jeanne’s father was also the result of his background: as I deduce, his own sympathy for his illegitimate grandfather, his guilt over abandoning Lise’s first-born, his namesake Pierre, and his continuing love for Lise. In 1868, almost half (47.9 per cent) of abandoned children died within the first year of their birth compared to 19.1 per cent of infants who were not abandoned.124 Renoir could have learned that Pierre Tréhot had died in infancy. It is possible that before Jeanne was born, Renoir had decided to stay involved in her life. Many years later in a moment of crisis, he wrote to her: ‘I have never abandoned you. I am doing what I can. I have no reason not to take care of you.’125 At the same time, throughout his life, Renoir was adamant about keeping Jeanne’s existence a secret from his parents, siblings, friends and eventual wife and children. It was only after his death, forty-nine years later, that his three sons learned about their half-sister from his will. Out of respect for their father, Renoir’s sons decided to retain the secret. Hence, Jean Renoir’s son, Alain Renoir, was never told anything about his aunt.126 Those few people who had known about Lise’s pregnancies knew that both infants had been given away, and they believed that the children were permanently gone from the lives of both the artist and his model. When Renoir’s health deteriorated in his fifties, he needed to enlist three people to send Jeanne money on his behalf and to help her see him (see Chapter 4). Renoir’s secretiveness about his relationship with Jeanne greatly complicated his life but is typical in involving secrets and complicated relationships. This led Pissarro later to write to his son that Renoir was the most unfathomable person he had ever met.127
While Renoir ensured that their relationship remained secret, the artist was concerned about his daughter throughout her life. It is most likely that Renoir found the foster mother for Jeanne. Renoir learned about Augustine from a grocer and his wife, whose store was in Montmartre, the artist quarter.128 The grocer, Jacques Blanchet (who may have been related to Augustine’s husband, François Blanchet), and his wife, Marie-Désirée Gautier,129 were from l’Être-Chapelle, a tiny hamlet near Sainte-Marguerite-de-Carrouges, a small town of 950 people in Alençon commune, Normandy. Augustine and François were relatively prosperous and lived in a three-storey brick home with their two children, François Auguste, aged twelve, and Eugénie Victorine, aged eight; their home had ample space for their foster children as well. Seven years after Jeanne’s birth, the Parisian grocer and his wife would be involved in sending their own grandson to be nursed by Augustine Blanchet.130 The French government paid wetnurses about 144 francs a year from birth through the end of a child’s twelfth year, in order to take care of abandoned or motherless children.131 Besides Au
gustine’s professional motivation, she and her husband were devout Catholics who were performing a charitable act by taking in foster children. Many years later, Jeanne referred to Augustine as her ‘foster mother’ and wrote of her and her husband that ‘they were always very kind to me’.132 That Jeanne aged forty-seven wrote this shows that Renoir had made a wise and fortuitous decision in his choice of a foster mother for his daughter.
For Augustine to travel from Normandy to Paris was arduous. First, she took a horse-drawn carriage 25 kilometres (15½ miles) to Argentan and then a six-hour train ride to Paris. As soon as Augustine received Lise’s newborn, she would immediately have begun nursing and bonding with the baby. Augustine then returned home with her foster daughter. It is not known whether Renoir ever visited his daughter or corresponded with Augustine during Jeanne’s childhood.133 However, he often travelled to Normandy to paint portraits, so he could easily have taken a train to visit Jeanne.
Given that Renoir insisted on secrecy about his fatherhood (so that later correspondence went to post boxes and never to his home), it is a surprise that he allowed Augustine to permit Jeanne to use Renoir as her last name. Church documents indicate that early in her life, as a young child, she was called Jeanne Marguerite Tréhot. Hence this name appears on her baptismal certificate when she was five on 23 May 1875. The baptism was delayed until this date so that Augustine’s daughter, Eugénie, would be old enough at thirteen to become her godmother. Jeanne had her first communion on 24 July 1881 and was confirmed on 15 June 1882 under the name Marguerite Renoir – the name she probably used when attending the school in her district.134 However, when Jeanne became an adolescent, she decided she preferred the name Jeanne. Thus, when she was a witness in several church ceremonies, she signed her name ‘Jeanne Renoir’ – on the marriage certificate of her godfather in 1885, on the marriage certificate of her godmother also in 1885, and on the baptismal certificate of her godson in 1893.135 Also, among the letters Jeanne saved from her father is an envelope with a postmark of 11 February 1892, addressed in Renoir’s handwriting to ‘Mlle Jeanne Renoir’ (see page 165).136
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