Marguerite Charpentier

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. • Illustration — Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Madame Georges Charpentier and Her Children, 1878. The children in this painting are Georgette and Paul. On Fridays from the mid 1870s to the early 1890s, Charpentier ran a political and literary salon at her house to which she invited writers, artists, musicians, actors, and politicians. Among those who attended were writers represented by her husband, including Gustave Flaubert, Alphonse Daudet, Guy de Maupassant, Théodore de Banville, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Émile Zola. Artists who came ranged from traditional realists like Carolus-Duran and Jean-Jacques Henner to Impressionists such as Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Alfred Sisley, Gustave Caillebotte, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Other visitors included the art critic Théodore Duret, the art collector Charles Ephrussi, the composers Camille Saint-Saëns and Jules Massenet, and the actor Sarah Bernhardt. 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. Renoir executed half a dozen commissioned portraits of Charpentier and her family, and even described himself at one point as the Charpentiers' "private painter". 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. 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.