Description
Her hat is the darkest, densest passage on the canvas, a deep navy felt piled up and folded in thick, almost sculptural strokes, brim tilted down over one side of her face. Renoir builds it with a loaded brush, ridges of near-black blue sitting up from the surface, so different from the smooth handling of her skin that the two textures seem to belong to different pictures stitched together.
Her face is turned slightly away, chin dropped, dark eyes looking off to one side rather than out at the viewer, an expression more private than posed. Cheeks and lips are touched with warm pink over an otherwise pale, softly blended complexion, and a thin white lace collar or jabot is knotted at her throat, a few quick strokes of white and pale blue against the same navy as the jacket below it.
Behind her the background breaks completely from the muted figure: streaks of yellow-green, ochre, and rust are dragged across the canvas in loose, unblended strokes, almost like a scarf of raw colour rather than any real setting. It pushes the cool navy of the hat and jacket forward and gives the whole portrait an unexpected charge, more about the collision of colour than about describing a room. A hat this dark and dense, painted almost as its own object, is an unusually bold passage for him next to the softer, more blended handling he generally gave clothing and accessories.
Seen from across a room the contrast does the work, that band of dark blue set against warm yellow-green practically vibrating at a distance. Closer in, the loose, dry background strokes and the built-up paint of the hat reward a slower look, two very different kinds of brushwork sitting side by side on one small canvas.
