1911

Renée, Three-Quarter View

French, 1875 - 1963

Renée, the daughter of one of Villon's cousins, began appearing in Villon's work in 1906, when she was a lithe and charming child. In adolescence, Renée became the dour presence seen here, and she was the subject of Villon's first bold experiments with a new sculptural treatment of the human figure. Much of the drama of this image derives from the contrast between the white paper and the dark areas that Villon produced with the drypoint technique. In drypoint, the artist engraves the lines directly into the plate, pushing up metal residue around the lines, which when inked, print as an almost three-dimensional texture, seen here most clearly in Renée's hair and in the shadows around her eyes.