Portrait of Ambroise Vollard c. 1904

Here at the Art Institute of Chicago, Renoir captured Ambroise Vollard's likeness using lithographic crayon and tusche. The image is soft and a bit blurry, like a memory, or the feeling when you take your glasses off. The marks are densely packed, and you can almost feel Renoir gently building up tone and mass. It’s a quiet, intimate image; Vollard isn’t posing, he’s simply captured in a moment of contemplation. I imagine Renoir and Vollard in the studio, a comfortable silence between them, broken only by the scratching of crayon on stone. Maybe Renoir was thinking about how to capture Vollard’s essence, not just his appearance, using only shades of gray and subtle gradations of tone. There’s a real conversation going on in this image. The tradition of portraiture handed down by the masters is being reimagined by Renoir. His soft, impressionistic style feels like a quiet revolution. It's a reminder that we're all part of something bigger, an ongoing artistic dialogue that stretches back centuries and continues to evolve.