Pierre-Auguste Renoir
b. 1841, Limoges, France; d. 1919, Cagnes-sur-Mer, France
Woman with Parakeet, 1871
Oil on canvas
The woman holding the parakeet is Lise Tréhot (1848-1922), an artist's model and Renoir's close companion of six years, whose features are recognizable in many of his paintings between 1866 and 1872. Though it predates Renoir's Impressionist style, Woman with Parakeet was rendered with the feathery, textured brushwork that characterizes his work. The intimate scene depicts a young, upper-middle-class woman playing with her pet bird, yet the stifling interior restricts the model's space, just like that of her parakeet when confined to its gilded cage.
These tensions embody the daily experience of a fashionable Parisian lady. Unlike men, women were limited almost exclusively to indoor, domestic spaces and were not permitted to roam freely throughout the city. Woman with Parakeet illustrates the contradictions that governed the lives of bourgeois women in nineteenth-century France.
