Pierre-Auguste Renoir

How do class, race, and gender affect our engagement with printed media? For the upper-class white woman in Renoir’s painting, reading a fashion magazine is a private pleasure—not a matter of public or political engagement. The print Mexican News, on the other hand, depicts media consumption in a social setting, where people from different classes and racial backgrounds have gathered. In this case, the news concerns Mexico’s loss of territory to the United States at the end of the Mexican-American War (1846–1848). Though their reading experience is shared, the group’s lack of social cohesion is apparent. The artist hints at this marginalization by placing the African American figures at lower right and the woman peeking from a window at upper right, barely in the frame. 

Nineteenth-century Parisians were avid consumers of illustrated journals. Renoir’s intimate painting of Aline Charigot, a young dressmaker who later became his wife, shares its focus with a newspaper spread of fashionable figures. Closely cropping the view, Renoir partially conceals his model’s face but captures her profile. He highlights the tone of her skin by opposing its warmth with the cool blue and white of the journal’s pages. Matching his brushstrokes to the textures of her costume and brilliant red hair, he then beckons viewers to the curve of her armchair and invites them to read over her shoulder.