Renoir. Compositions with Stairs. From the Revived Masterpieces series
26 May 2009 - 6 September 2009

26 May 2009, the State Hermitage Museum (the Winter Palace, the Apollo Room, No. 260) opened the first exhibition from the cycle Restored Masterpieces dedicated to the work of restorers. The exhibition will feature two restored paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

The pair paintings Man on a Staircase and Woman on a Staircase belong to the most unusual paintings by Auguste Renoir (1841 - 1919). They date back to 1876 and were ordered by Georges Charpentier, the famous publisher, and his wife Marguerite, daughter of a court jeweler of Napoleon III. Their salon was the most renowned one in Paris. Among the celebrities attending the salon there were Gustave Flaubert, Edmond de Goncourt, Emil Zola, Alfons Daudet, Ivan Turgenev, Gui de Maupassant, Kamil Sen-Sans, Jules Massenet, Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas and other prominent European artists. Initially both canvases decorated the staircase in the mansion.

The purpose of the compositions with the staircase was to present the generalized images of the contemporary Parisians. The model for the 'male' painting was Renoir’s brother Edmond. The model for the female painting, according to Georges Riviere, a friend of the painter, was 'some beautiful big girl who Renoir found once on Pigale Square'. It still remains unknown who she was. The compositions presupposed that the characters should have a direct connection with the house of Charpentier. Renoir tried to underline it reproducing not only the main staircase of the mansion, but also such 'characteristic' feature as a Japanese fan. The interest towards Japanese art was shared both by the lady of the house and the impressionists.

Apparently, in the second half of the 1880-s the Charpantier decided to ‘renew’ the picture which led to a change in the original colour range. The canvases absorbed dust and dirt and lost the brightness of colours when they were covered by lacquer that 'superimposed' itself upon the original structure of the painting, and the next layers of the yellow lacquer, applied without notifying the author, aggravated the damage done to the painting. After the death of the Charpentier their collection was sold in 1907: both 'compositions with the staircase' were bought by a German collector named Otto Gerstenberg. With the fall of Berlin in 1945, alongside with other 'removed works of art', they were brought to the Hermitage where they were stored in a special repository for many years.

After the inclusion in the Hermitage exhibition in 1995 the necessity of taking off the foreign layers became evident. The restoration of the canvases, that took more than a year, was performed by one of the best restorers of the museum Valeriy Brovkin, which eventually gave a magnificent result: he managed to reveal the initial brilliancy of the painting by Renoir. He 'gave a new birth' not only to the pure tones, but also to the light that spiritualizes the colours of the paintings in a special way. Alongside with the arabesques of the staircase rails, this light coming out of the depth is yet another feature uniting the two canvases.

The curator of the exhibition and the author of the booklet (published by the State Hermitage) is Albert Kostenevich, Doctor of Sciences in Art, senior staff member of the Department of Western European Art.

Man on a Staircase. Detail
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Larger view

Man on a Staircase
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Larger view

Woman on a Staircase
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Larger view

Restorer Valeriy Brovkin
Larger view