Description
Almost half the sheet is left bare. In the middle of all that untouched paper sits a young woman in a yellow bonnet and dark bodice, perched sideways on the gunwale of a white rowboat, her white skirt pooling around her. We see her from behind and slightly to the side, her face turned away, watching the water rather than us.
Above her a single cloud, painted in loose loops of cobalt and lemon yellow, hangs reflected in a patch of blue water that has been laid on wet and left to bleed at the edges. A few strokes of green mark reeds at the lower left, and a smudge of reddish brown drifts on the water to the right, maybe a buoy, maybe nothing more than a stray wash. In the top left corner a few faint pencil lines and a scrap of blue wash sit outside the main composition, a leftover trial that was never developed.
This is watercolor, not oil, and it shows: the boat’s hull is a few economical strokes of cream and rust, the water a series of overlapping blue washes rather than built-up paint. Renoir worked mostly in heavy, buttery oils, so a sheet this thin and this incomplete, more sketch than finished picture, is a genuinely different side of him, closer to a private study than to a finished exhibition piece.
What holds the page together is restraint. The bonnet’s yellow is the only strong color note against acres of cream paper and pale blue, and it’s placed exactly where the eye wants to land. On a wall it reads as quiet and airy rather than dramatic, a small pocket of color and gesture surrounded by breathing room, which makes it sit comfortably in a room that already has a lot going on.
