Marguerite Charpentier (1 March 1848 – 30 November 1904) was a French salonist and art collector who was one of the earliest champions of the Impressionists, especially Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
Biography
She was born Marguerite Louise Lemonnier in Paris to Alexandre-Gabriel Lemonnier, the court jeweler, and Sophie Raymonde (née Duchâtenet). In 1871, she married the publisher Georges Charpentier and they had four children: Georgette, Marcel, Paul, and Jeanne.
Charpentier and her husband amassed a small but significant collection of paintings, mostly by French Impressionist painters. In 1875, Charpentier acquired three Impressionist paintings by Renoir, making her one of the first art collectors to buy Impressionist work.[1] Renoir executed half a dozen commissioned portraits of Charpentier and her family, and even described himself at one point as the Charpentiers' "private painter".[2] His 1878 portrait of Charpentier and two of her children was acclaimed at the 1879 Paris Salon, and the writer Marcel Proust refers to this painting in the last volume of his novel cycle In Search of Lost Time.[3]
In the early 1880s, Georges Charpentier's publishing firm ran into financial difficulties and the Charpentiers were forced to sell off part of the art collection.
After Marguerite Charpentier died in 1904 and Georges in 1905, their surviving children auctioned the remainder of the art collection. Some of it is now in major museums, including the Musée d'Orsay and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
De Goncourt, Edmond. Journal des Goncourt, vol. 5 (1872–1877). Paris: Bibliothèque-Charpentier, 1891. (in French)
Kostenevič, Alʹbert G. (1995). Aus der Eremitage verschollene Meisterwerke deutscher Privatsammlungen (in German). München: Kindler. ISBN978-3-463-40278-9. OCLC231644871.
MacQuillan, Melissa (1986). Porträtmalerei der französischen Impressionisten (in German). Rosenheim. ISBN978-3-475-52508-7. OCLC241826035.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
Proust, Marcel (1927). Le Temps Retrouvé (in French). Paris: Gallimard.
Robida, Michel. Le Salon Charpentier et les impressionistes. Paris: Bibliothèque des arts, 1958. (in French)