Self-Portrait at the Age of Thirty Five 1876

Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted this self-portrait in his mid-thirties using oil on canvas. During Renoir’s time, the art world was shifting, with Impressionism challenging traditional academic painting. In this context, Renoir, a white, male, bourgeois artist, navigates his identity, presenting himself as a modern painter. What do we expect from a self portrait? Renoir gives us a version of himself that feels both intimate and performed. His gaze meets ours, yet there is a sense of distance, perhaps reflecting his own negotiation of selfhood and artistic identity amidst social change. Renoir's Impressionist style, with its emphasis on light and fleeting moments, challenges the more rigid portraiture styles of the past. "The pain passes, but the beauty remains," Renoir once said, and while we don’t know if he was talking about his experience as a model, his words captures the emotion captured here. This self-portrait reflects both the personal and the political, offering us a window into the artist’s soul as well as the shifting cultural landscape of 19th-century France.