Doll News Winter 2018 - 73

The following year the Mandelkorns consigned the ﬁgure to
Theriault's of Annapolis, Maryland. During their The Empress and
the Child auction, the winning bidder of Gold Horse lot number 66
was Liv Greta Brem of Norway. Renoir's Doll went on prominent
display in Liv's museum in Oslo not far from Expressionist artist
Edvard Munch's (The Scream) family dolls.
Nine months after Liv's death in November 2016, Fleurette was
placed in Theriault's summer Marquis auction, I Only Wanted to
Wonder, as lot number 204. The winning bidder was stunned to see
Renoir's Doll again. She had visited the little ﬁgure several times
during the Kimbell Art Museum's exhibition, Renoir's Portraits:
Impressions of an Age, in 1998.
She had never forgotten her.

The Question

Did the child-sized mannequin actually stand in Renoir's 19th
century studio serving as his muse-his model-when a child was
too restless to quietly pose?
There is no written proof.
Only the verbal provenance given to Eugenia Miller
Mandelkorn by the Miami antique shop owner in 1976 exists: the
mannequin had been given by Renoir-or sold-to his friend Bernard
Davis, Philadelphia textile magnate-turned Miami art museum owner-
and patron of the Impressionists.
The well-documented facts remain, however, that leading art
scholars in the United States and in France consider the ﬁgure
to be one of Renoir's studio mannequins. The 42-inch bundle of
papier-mâché, wood, wool, taffeta and feathers was in at least two
major art exhibitions honoring Renoir's portraiture.
Perhaps Jefferson Harrison, Chief Curator at the Chrysler
Museum of Art in 1998 said it best: "Though the record remains
tantalizingly incomplete, Renoir may have used this mannequin
during the hectic days of the 1870s and 1880s... Renoir was
inundated by portrait commissions at that time, and he needed
something like this to move the painting process along. So it brings
a bit of his studio to the Chrysler-and gives one a great sense of
how such paintings came about."
"If you compare her to Renoir's paintings," said the Renoir
Doll's long-time owner Eugenia Mandelkorn, "you just know she
was Renoir's."
"You can feel it in your heart."

Crippled with arthritis, Renoir began sculpting
toward the end of his life. Buste de Coco was
one of only two sculptures Renoir executed
entirely with his own hands, without the aid of his
assistant, Richard Guino. Coco was one of Renoir's
sons. Photo courtesy of: Heritage Auctions

A Footnote

During the last twenty years of his life, Renoir suffered with
severe arthritis. He was bound to a wheelchair but continued to
paint. Strapping a brush to his arm, when asked why he continued
to paint, he replied, "The pain passes, but the beauty remains."
With the help of an assistant, Richard Guino, he created sculptures
until his death in 1919. Renoir sculpted the Buste de Coco himself.
The deeply sculpted eyes and closed lips of Coco, Renoir's son, are
reminiscent of those belonging to Renoir's Doll.

Pictured in his studio, a wheelchairbound Renoir continued to paint with
brushes strapped to his crippled hand.
"The pain passes, but the beauty
remains," he once said.
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Doll News Winter 2018
