Description
This is a drawing rather than a painted canvas, and it shows: Renoir builds the woman’s form entirely from loose coloured hatching, red, black and blue pencil strokes laid side by side rather than blended, so that up close the whole figure breaks into a web of individual lines. She sits turned three-quarters away, her head bowed slightly as she looks down at something in her lap, dark hair pulled back and caught with a small pale ornament.
Across her shoulders is a wide white wrap or fur stole, drawn in soft, feathery pencil strokes that leave large areas of the paper showing through, giving it a light, almost weightless quality against the darker red of her dress below. Her hands rest together at her lap, sketched quickly with only a few lines to suggest fingers and folded cloth.
Behind her, the background is built from vertical bands of ochre, blue and green, striped like a curtain or screen, laid down with the same loose hatching as the figure so that sitter and setting share one restless, sketchy energy. Nothing here is smoothed or finished; every mark stays visible as a distinct stroke of coloured pencil. Worked sheets like this one, in coloured pencil rather than oil, are a smaller and less publicised part of his practice, studies made at the pace of a sketch rather than for exhibition.
Signed simply Renoir at the lower right, the sheet has the immediacy of a study made directly from a model, quick observation rather than a laboured studio composition. Framed and hung, its warm reds and cool background stripes give it real presence despite the modest, unfinished technique.
