by Tom Gurney
Tom Gurney BSc (Hons) is an art history expert with over 20 years experience
Published on June 19, 2020 / Updated on October 2, 2026
Email: tomgurney1@gmail.com / Phone: +44 7429 011000
Auguste Renoir's reputation rests mainly on paintings, but his drawings show how varied his work could be before and beside an oil canvas. A quick charcoal figure, a carefully prepared bather, an illustration in black ink and a portrait built from coloured pastel serve different purposes. None should be used as evidence for one unchanging way of drawing. The sheets that survive also give an incomplete picture of what once lay in his studio.
The Musée d'Orsay's 2026 exhibition Renoir dessinateur drew attention to that range. Described by the museum as the first exhibition devoted to his drawings since 1921, it brought together pen and ink, graphite, black chalk, charcoal, red chalk, pastel and watercolour, as well as prints. Looking at the paper works by medium and purpose makes sense of a career often divided too simply into “spontaneous” Impressionism and a later return to line. Musée d'Orsay, Renoir dessinateur. [1]
Contents
- What survives from the early years?
- Illustration and the people in a story
- Pastel: drawing with colour
- A seated woman, seen twice
- Drawings for The Great Bathers
- Landscape notes and watercolour
- Later drawing and changing purposes
- Browse Renoir drawings
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Watch on YouTubeWhat survives from the early years?
Renoir learned to draw while training as a porcelain painter and through a free municipal school. In 1860 he gained permission to copy at the Louvre, then studied in Charles Gleyre's studio and at the École des Beaux-Arts. Drawing was part of that education, even if few sheets from his youth can now be examined. A lack of surviving paper should not be turned into a claim that he lacked the skill.
Orsay observes that very few Renoir drawings made before 1880 are known. During much of the 1870s he often worked directly on the canvas to describe the colour and light in front of him. That practice helped produce the visible brushwork associated with Impressionism. It does not mean that every 1870s painting was completed without revision or that no drawing preceded any one picture. An individual work needs its own technical evidence.
The first more coherent group of surviving sheets, from the end of the 1870s, includes studies of contemporary life in several black media. Some were intended for books and periodicals. A drawing prepared for reproduction in print has a different task from a private sketch or a study for a painting: it must make the action, gestures and relationships legible when reduced and transferred to a page.
Illustration and the people in a story
Two works in the gallery below have especially long titles: On the Terrace of a Hotel in Bordighera: The Painter Jean Martin Reviews His Bill and The Descent from the Summit: Jean Martin Steadies Hélène, the Banker's Daughter. The Art Institute of Chicago identifies both as illustrations for “L'étiquette” by Renoir's brother Edmond, made in 1881. They depict fictional moments in a written story. Their named figures are therefore not securely identified portrait sitters, and the Bordighera setting does not by itself make the drawing a documentary record of a real visit. Art Institute, On the Terrace [2]; Art Institute, Descent from the Summit. [3]
The media differ. The Bordighera sheet combines Conté crayon with pen, brush and black ink; its line has to carry the scene even without the colours of oil paint. Descent from the Summit uses black chalk on laid paper. The Art Institute's technical report describes heavy lines for the two figures and finer ones for faces and hands. Unworked paper supplies the highlights. Such choices make the clasped hands and the moment of help legible without painting every surface.
The Descent sheet also has a faint later figure sketch on the back. The two sides have separate titles and dates in the Art Institute's catalogue: the story illustration on the front belongs to 1881, while the half-length woman on the reverse is placed about 1883. An image of only one face of the sheet can hide part of its working history. That is one reason a museum's object record is more useful than a thumbnail title alone.
Orsay notes that Renoir made fifteen drawings for the magazine La Vie Moderne over seven years. Georges Charpentier, its publisher, was also a supporter of the painter. The drawings appeared through a photomechanical process rather than the more usual wood engraving. This placed Renoir's work in a printed culture with different readers and constraints from the Salon or an independent art exhibition.
Pastel: drawing with colour
Pastel allowed Renoir to combine the speed of drawing with the colour of powdered pigment. Orsay describes it as portable and well suited to children who might not sit still for a long oil portrait. A pastel could also cost a client less than an oil painting. Those practical features matter to the history of portraiture: the medium changed what could be made, where and for whom.
Pastel marks can remain distinct, be layered, or be softened together. The result may look delicate, but it is not simply a preliminary sketch for something “finished” in oil. Renoir used the medium for portraits, imagined figures and scenes of contemporary life. Orsay says pastels were among the few types of his graphic work displayed publicly while he lived. A drawing gallery therefore should not imply that all paper works remained hidden studio material.
Colour also crosses the boundary between a work on paper and a painting. Renoir could use a pastel to test how contrasting tones brought a figure forward or made light seem to move across a face. The decision belongs to the specific work, not to a fixed hierarchy in which oil is automatically more complete than chalk.
A seated woman, seen twice
The Art Institute's Woman Seated in a Chair, dated about 1883, is a useful example of an informal study that has its own material history. The front is mainly charcoal with graphite, stumping and erasure on ivory paper. A lighter graphite drawing of a seated woman seen from behind occupies the reverse. The museum catalogues both faces as one physical sheet, with separate recto and verso identifiers. Art Institute, Woman Seated in a Chair. [4]
On the front, repeated contours and uneven shading make the figure seem caught during a short sitting. The museum's examination shows how rubbing and lifting material from the paper changed the tones. Its infrared images help make the fainter drawing on the reverse readable. “Quickly drawn” here describes some of the marks; it does not settle why Renoir kept, returned to, or reused this paper.
Drawings for The Great Bathers
In the early 1880s Renoir began to make larger sets of studies for ambitious figure pictures. Orsay identifies Dance in the Country of 1882–83 as the first large painting he prepared with an important body of drawings. The most sustained surviving example is the work for The Great Bathers, painted from the mid-1880s to 1887 and now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
An 1883 pen and brush drawing at the National Gallery of Art makes that preparation visible in a different dance subject. It shows the paired dancers in gray ink on wove paper, at 47.6 × 30.2 cm. This is the Washington sheet 1995.47.65, not the separate Orsay black-pencil study RF 31717. The same motif could be tested in more than one drawing, and neither sheet should be described as an exact tracing of the finished oil painting without evidence of that function. NGA, Dance in the Country. [5]
The Art Institute's Splashing Figure, made in 1884/85, is nearly a metre tall. It studies a woman at the right of the finished painting. Red, white and black chalk and Conté crayon give her body weight and movement on tan paper. The museum's technical examination finds that Renoir laid white chalk beneath darker marks, blended red and black passages, and also removed material to recover lighter areas. The figure's brightness is therefore built both by adding and by taking away. Art Institute, Splashing Figure. [6]
 Pierre-Auguste Renoir.jpg)
Placed beside the dance drawing, the bather study makes a change of working problem clear. The dancing pair can be held together through contours and a few areas of gray ink. In Splashing Figure, Renoir needed coloured chalk, layered white and rubbed passages to test how a body might turn and catch light. The comparison shows media serving different questions, rather than a career moving in a straight line from loose to precise drawing.
The large canvas did not follow from one neat preparatory drawing. Other studies tried the splashing woman's pose from different directions and tested several arrangements of bathers. A faint erased foot beside the Art Institute figure raises a further question about how the sheet was altered. The museum cannot establish with certainty whether Renoir erased it or whether a later change to the paper removed part of a larger composition. This is a small but useful lesson in reading drawings: visible evidence can show a change without identifying the hand or reason behind it.
When Berthe Morisot visited Renoir's studio in 1886, she was struck by the number and quality of the studies. Orsay cites her response to challenge the idea that Impressionist pictures were always made casually or without preparation. Her observation belongs to this particular project and moment. It does not erase the painter's more direct way of working on other canvases.
The drawings also clarify why The Great Bathers looked so different when it appeared at Georges Petit's 1887 international exhibition. Orsay explains that critics recognised Renoir's effort to renew his art but found the finished painting's dry contours, pale colours and apparent separation of figures from background difficult. That response belongs to the oil canvas and its display, not automatically to every preparatory sheet. The studies allow us to see the experiment at work before the disputed public result. Musée d'Orsay, Renoir dessinateur, “Autour de Baigneuses”. [1]
Landscape notes and watercolour
Not all the 1880s paper works concern bodies. Studies of Trees and Foliage, dated 1884/87 by the Art Institute, places five small pen-and-ink and watercolour experiments across one sheet. Some areas are lightly drawn; others combine transparent washes with more opaque colour. The sheet does not need to be read as a complete landscape. It lets a viewer watch different treatments of leaf, branch and light being tried side by side. Art Institute, Studies of Trees and Foliage. [7]
The Art Institute describes one physical sheet, accession 1948.75. When comparing images with similar titles, the accession number is a better guide to object identity than small differences in a gallery label.
By March 1888, Renoir was writing from Martigues to his friend Paul Bérard about being “forced” into watercolour and finding the practice useful. The Musée d’Orsay exhibition account [1] reads his joking description against a French convention that treated watercolour as an amateur or feminine pursuit. Orsay also notes evidence of Renoir’s interest in the medium as early as the 1860s, although travel in the 1880s and 1890s made it more regular in his work. Its portable materials helped him make colour notes directly from a subject; transparent washes could leave the white support to supply light. A watercolour could be immediate, but it need not be an unworked first thought or only preparation for an oil painting.
The same Orsay account estimates that about a hundred Renoir watercolours are known today. Many were undated studio materials rather than public exhibits during his lifetime; a few were dedicated to close collectors. That uneven survival and visibility make it risky to describe watercolour as a minor late diversion from painting. The sheets provide their own evidence of how he carried colour observations between travel, studio and finished work. Musée d'Orsay, Renoir dessinateur, “Sur le motif”. [1]
The Art Institute's Grove of Trees, dated 1888/90, shows this practice in a single object. On a cream paper sheet only 24.6 × 17.9 cm, Renoir built the tree trunks with thin opaque strokes, placed brighter greens and yellows through the foliage, and used transparent washes for the grassy foreground. Close examination finds no graphite underdrawing; the brush seems to have supplied both line and colour. Small holes at the corners suggest that the sheet may have been pinned to a board for outdoor work, though that is an inference, not a recorded session. Art Institute, Grove of Trees. [8]
The same technical report describes light and dark colours laid in sequence and a white area that fluoresces under ultraviolet light. Such details are easy to miss in a reproduction. They also resist a claim that watercolour meant only thin, transparent staining: Renoir combined transparent and opaque applications to give the grove depth. The museum compares the motif with a related painting but says neither work is known to have served directly as a study for a more finished composition. The sheet can be read as landscape thinking complete in its own medium, rather than automatically as a step toward an oil painting. Art Institute technical report. [8]
Later drawing and changing purposes
After the difficult reception of The Great Bathers, Renoir did not simply stop drawing. He continued to use chalk, pastel and watercolour for figures, portraits and scenes of family life. Subjects moved among media: a gesture might be explored on paper, developed in oil and reconsidered in another form. Late drawings also supplied ideas for collaborative sculpture. Their purpose cannot always be settled from subject alone.
The Musée d'Orsay describes large late red-chalk figure drawings and notes that Ambroise Vollard first exhibited some in 1912. Their scale made drawing a substantial work in its own right, even when a related painting or sculpture exists. Renoir's arthritis is part of the late working conditions, but the surviving line, colour and size must also be evaluated as artistic decisions.
The gallery below brings together studies, illustrations and works in colour. Its labels are navigation aids. Follow an individual museum record when a title, date, medium or recto and verso history matters, and compare the drawings with the paintings and style and technique pages.
Browse Renoir drawings
The gallery below brings together 11 works or groups of studies, each with its own article. Use the individual article and museum record to check object identities when similar titles appear.
 Pierre-Auguste Renoir.jpg)
Renoir artworks directory
Discussion
Look closely at Drawings and use the questions below to compare what you see with the documented history.
Reader Insights
How does a study reveal a decision that the finished canvas conceals?
Compare the medium and purpose of an early sheet with a later bather study.
Which drawing-to-painting link needs more evidence than visual resemblance?
Join the Conversation
Share a close observation or a source-backed question about Drawings. The prompts above are starting points for discussion.
References
- Musée d'Orsay, Renoir dessinateur detailed exhibition text View source.
- Art Institute of Chicago, On the Terrace of a Hotel in Bordighera View source.
- Art Institute of Chicago, The Descent from the Summit View source.
- Art Institute of Chicago, Woman Seated in a Chair View source.
- National Gallery of Art, Dance in the Country, 1995.47.65, object record and public-domain image View source.
- Art Institute of Chicago, Splashing Figure View source.
- Art Institute of Chicago, Studies of Trees and Foliage View source.
- Art Institute of Chicago, Grove of Trees, catalogue essay and technical report on opaque and transparent watercolour View source.
- Lead image credit. Image: Auguste Renoir, Dance in the Country, 1883, pen and brush with gray ink. National Gallery of Art, 1995.47.65; public-domain image.
