Gabrielle Fernande Renard

Gabrielle Renard (August 1, 1878 – February 26, 1959) was a French woman who became an important member of the family of the painter, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, first becoming a nanny and subsequently, a frequent model for the artist. She is recognized as the mentor to Jean Renoir, creating and encouraging his interest in filmmaking. Upon her marriage in 1921 she became Gabrielle Renard-Slade. Born in Essoyes in the Aube departement of France, she was a cousin of Aline Victorine Charigot Renoir, who had married the painter, Pierre-Auguste. The village was the birthplace of Aline also. At age sixteen, Gabrielle Renard moved to Montmartre to live and work as a nanny in her cousin's household, where the second of the three Renoir sons was about to be born. Renard became the subject of a number of Renoir's portraits, many of her with the children. Gabrielle Renard developed a strong bond with the infant, Jean Renoir, that would last throughout their lives. She introduced him to the Guignol puppet shows that were held in the Montmartre. Gabrielle was fascinated by the new motion picture invention and when Jean Renoir was only a few years old, Gabrielle took him to see his first film. He became a renowned film maker. During the final years of Pierre-Auguste Renoir's life he suffered from severe rheumatoid arthritis, but continued to paint with her help. When the family moved to a farm at Cagnes-sur-Mer near the Mediterranean coast, seeking a better climate for Renoir's arthritis, Gabrielle moved with them. While he worked in the studio at "Les Collettes," Gabrielle would place the paint brush between his crippled fingers. Devoted to her cousin's family, Gabrielle Renard did not marry until 1921, when the Renoir children were grown. Her husband, Conrad Hensler Slade (1871–1949), was an aspiring painter from a wealthy American family. They had a son that they named, Jean Slade. Following the occupation of France by the Germans during World War II, Gabrielle and her family moved to the United States, her husband's native country. Jean Renoir also moved to the United States during the war. Being a successful film director, he settled in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California. When Gabrielle's husband died in 1955, she moved to Beverly Hills to be near Jean Renoir. Gabrielle Renard-Slade died at her home in Beverly Hills in 1959. In his memoirs, My Life and My Films, Jean Renoir begins and ends his book with discussion of Gabrielle Renard, and, throughout the autobiography, he recounts the profound influence Gabrielle had upon his life. He wrote, "She taught me to see the face behind the mask and the fraud behind the flourishes", and he concluded with the words he said he had often spoken as a child, "Wait for me, Gabrielle".

• ******* Gabrielle, the best-known of the models who appeared in Renoir’s later paintings—she features in about two hundred of his works, far more than any other. Known as Gabrielle, or simply called “Ga,” she was born in 1878 in the town of Essoyes, which was also the birthplace of Renoir’s wife Aline. Gabrielle’s parents were the widow Marie Céleste Prélat, a grocer, and Charles Paul Renard, an unmarried wine-grower. Renard officially declared his paternity, and married the girl’s mother four years later; the couple subsequently also had a son. In May 1895 Marie Céleste’s son from her first marriage wedded Marie Victorine Maire, who was related to Aline, thus establishing a relationship between the Renoir and Renard families. To help care for the infant Jean, Aline asked Gabrielle, whom she could now consider a distant cousin, to join the Renoir household in the chateau des Brouillards, at 13, rue Girardon, Paris.

Gabrielle was a practical and hard-working country girl. Jean Renoir later recalled that “at ten she could tell the year of any wine, catch trout with her hands without getting caught by the game warden, tend the cows, help bleed the pigs, gather greens for rabbits and collect manure dropped by the horses as they came in from the fields—a treasure which everyone coveted” (Renoir, My Father, New York, 1958, p. 264). High-spirited and independent, but deeply loyal to her adoptive family, Gabrielle became an indispensable helpmate in the daily life of the Renoir home, especially after the artist purchased a house in Essoyes, where Gabrielle was completely in her element. She was devoted to Jean, her chief responsibility, and became his surrogate mother. Gabrielle’s warmly glowing presence enlivens many of the artist’s most charming domestic scenes during this period—she crouches in the foreground, with the toddler Jean in her protective grasp, in La famille d’artiste, 1896 (Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania).

Several years later Renoir began to paint Gabrielle in the nude; she appears half-length with her breasts exposed in Gabrielle à la rose (La Sicilienne), circa 1899 (exh. cat., op. cit., 2009, no. 23). Renoir had rented a summer house in Magagnosc, near Grasse. As Jean Renoir recalled, “It was in that house that Gabrielle began posing in the nude for the first time.