Portrait of Stephane Mallarme 1892

Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted this portrait of Stéphane Mallarmé in France, and while the exact date is unknown, it likely dates from the 1890s. Mallarmé was a leading symbolist poet, and Renoir here seems to be subtly portraying Mallarmé as a man of letters. The soft brushwork gives a sense of intellectualism, a departure from the formal portraiture of the French Academy. But while Renoir and Mallarmé were progressives, we shouldn’t forget that their challenges to academic art happened within a specific institutional context. These men wanted to reform art institutions, not necessarily tear them down. Historians researching the period can explore Renoir’s personal relationships with other cultural figures, as well as exhibition records and published reviews of his work. By situating Renoir within his social and institutional context, we can understand the conditions that shaped his art, and the meaning it held for his contemporaries.