Marguerite Charpentier

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.

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.

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.

Charpentier and her husband amassed a small but significant collection of paintings, mostly by French Impressionist painters.

[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.