Portrait of Richard Wagner

This drawing was made after a portrait of the musician which Renoir painted in January 1882 in Sicily (now in the Bibliothèque de l'Opéra, Paris). It was reproduced in La Vie Moderne, February 24, 1883, and had probably been done especially to illustrate an obituary of Wagner. (The size of the reproduction was 7 × 5½¨.)

Concerning his portrait painting, Renoir wrote from Palermo to a friend: "Wagner was very jolly and I very nervous and sorry I was not Ingres. I believe I used the time well; thirty-five minutes is not much. But if I had stopped before it would have been very beautiful, for toward the end my model lost his good humor and became stiff. I followed too closely this change... Afterward Wagner wanted to see. He said: 'Ah! Ah! I look like a Protestant priest,' which was true..."

Wagner is also supposed to have said--but not to Renoir--that the portrait was like "an embryo of an angel which an epicurean had swallowed, thinking it was an oyster." (See E. Lockspeiser: "The Renoir Portraits of Wagner," Music and Letters, January 1937.)

Another Renoir sketch of Wagner, in oils, is in the collection of Alfred Cortot. Renoir also drew a portrait of the composer after a photograph from c. 1865 (but his drawing must have been done some twenty years later), which is reproduced in A. Jullien: Richard Wagner, sa vie et ses oeuvres, Paris, 1886, p. 157 and was probably made for this book. Jullien was a friend of Fantin-Latour with whom Renoir shared in his youth an ardent admiration for Wagner.

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