A group of six young women stand on a Paris street, close together, their arms intertwined. One strains forward, her chest pushed out, hands on hips. Behind, at the far right of the sheet, stand two men. One cups his hands to his mouth as if to shout; the other, more subdued, wears his cap tipped down. They wear smocks rather than jackets, perhaps just having left work. A man in a top hat stands before them; he hunches over a newspaper, ignoring their provocations. At the far left of the composition a family, presumably mother, father, and son, is distanced spatially and socially from the band of young women.

To read this image as a narrative is entirely appropriate. It illustrates a scene from Émile Zola’s L’assommoir, an exposé about hard drinking and its social consequences that caused something of a scandal in the late 1870s. The seventh in Zola’s series chronicling the Rougon-Macquart family, the story revolves around the laundress Gervaise. Her headstrong daughter Anna, nicknamed Nana, first appears to the reader toward the close of the book. In this drawing she appears simply as the most prominent of the cavorting adolescents.

Another drawing by the artist—now in the collection of Jean Bonna—is also clearly associated with L’assommoir. That sheet (fig. 5.5 [Dauberville 677]), a looser, more freely worked study executed in brush and ink, includes Zola’s inscription and even a page number at the bottom: “Off they went, the six of them, taking up the whole width of the road, arm in arm in their light dresses, their hair tied with ribbons.”13 It seems likely that the Art Institute’s version of the scene was produced in pen and ink because the Bonna drawing, lacking definition, would have been unsuitable for reproduction.14

Renoir did not make his illustration for the novel’s debut appearance in print. L’assommoir was serialized in 1876 in the democratic newspaper Le bien publique.15 In 1877 Georges Charpentier published it in full; its popularity soon necessitated reprints. Like Zola, Renoir found a supporter in Charpentier, and in the same year that he made the book illustrations, he painted the publisher’s wife (fig. 5.6 [Daulte 266; Dauberville 239]).16 The Art Institute’s work was commissioned by Charles Marpon and Ernest Flammarion for a deluxe edition of the novel published in 1878.17 They requested contributions from ten artists, including Henri Gervex, André Gill, Georges Clairin, and Frédéric Régamey. Renoir’s four contributions differed markedly from the others, which focused on the violence and unpleasantness of the novel. The sympathetic appearance of the present scene is in evident contrast to such images as Gill’s Fight between Gervaise and Virginie, in which the two characters attack one another ferociously, their bare legs and arms on show.18

In its multifigure composition and rich detail, Workers on the Outer Boulevard is the most elaborate of Renoir’s efforts for L’assommoir. Whether by design or coincidence, the subject of the passage was well suited to the artist’s flair for the sensual. The section in which the drawing appears tells of the fifteen-year-old Nana’s precocious beauty—“fully developed and no corset, with a real magpie face, milky complexion and skin as velvety as a peach.”19 Zola explains that Nana and her friends were born and raised on the streets—and, consequently, assumed ownership thereof—but Renoir subdues the vulgarity of the laughing, shouting characters even while depicting their exuberance. In the drawing, Nana is the third figure from the left among the group of girls. In a sheet in which the surface is mostly covered with a network of fine, closely spaced lines, Renoir’s relatively sparse use of media in her description makes her appear all the more vivid. An absence of ink creates an effect of falling light, which accentuates her bust and skirt, drawing attention to her curves. The artist emphasizes the attractiveness of the young women, perhaps mindful of Zola’s description of them “bursting their bodices by displaying their swelling forms.”20 Nana excited “obvious admiration”; an admiration, perhaps, that Renoir encouraged the viewer to ape.

There may have been no agenda behind the artist’s focus on the positive aspects of the text, but his dissatisfaction with Zola’s vision of the working classes may have informed his choice. Some years later, in conversation with the dealer Ambroise Vollard, Renoir recounted how he had frequented the salon of Madame Charpentier with Zola and others in the 1870s. Zola’s novel L’oeuvre (The Masterpiece), which depicts the life of a failed artist, had been the cause of many arguments in such circles, Renoir admitted, but his annoyance went beyond that infamous case. “I’ve always hated what he [Zola] writes,” he related. “When you want to paint an environment, you should start, so it seems to me, by putting yourself in your characters’ shoes. Zola, he is happy to open a little window, have a quick look outside, and assume that he has painted the people by saying that they smell bad.”21

In addition to being an unabashed sensualist, Renoir had a well-documented preference for uneducated women.22 Finding lack of sophistication a virtue, it is likely that he delighted in—rather than disapproved of—the type of girl that Zola found crude. It is clear that in major works of this era, including Dance at the Moulin de la Galette (fig. 5.7 [Daulte 209; Dauberville 211]), shown in the third Impressionist exhibition of 1877, Renoir portrayed women of Nana’s class in a sympathetic light.23 And in 1898, as the art historian Colin Bailey has noted, Julie Manet recorded that Renoir viewed Montmartre families as sensitive souls, in marked contrast to Zola’s description of them as “atrocious beings.”24

A painting of a laundress in the collection of the Art Institute (fig. 5.8 cat. 6) [Daulte 348; Dauberville 382]) also relates to L’assomoir and, once more, appears rather picturesque, given the novel’s general tone.25 Ostensibly it shows a washerwoman taking a moment’s pause. Renoir also revisited the theme  some years later, in Washerwomen (fig. 5.9 [Dauberville 948]) and in a lightly drawn study, Laundress (1885–89; Courtauld Gallery, London);26 but these quasi-pastoral images are far removed from the celebration of youthful idleness that is Workers’ Daughters on the Outer Boulevard.
Nancy Ireson