Description
This is a sketch more than a finished portrait, a child’s face built up fast in a handful of loaded strokes before the paint had time to settle. The hair is a tangle of gold, ochre, and honey-coloured marks, brushed in long strokes that fall past the shoulders, with a small pink or coral bow just visible tucked into it near the forehead.
The eyes are closed, or nearly so, rendered as two dark, quick marks rather than anything studied, and the whole lower face, the round cheeks, the small mouth, sits in warm rose and cream tones that Renoir clearly enjoyed laying down wet into wet. A white ruffled collar is suggested with a few broad, chalky strokes rather than drawn in any detail.
The background is left thin and unresolved, a warm buttery wash on the right giving way to an olive green patch on the left, and a soft charcoal-grey shape behind the head that reads as shadow, or perhaps an abandoned first idea for a hat. You can see the weave of the canvas through the paint in several places, which only adds to the sense of a fast, working study rather than a completed commission. Loose, rapid studies of a child’s head like this sit closer to a private note than a finished commission, and he kept returning to the children in his own household for exactly this kind of quick, unguarded record.
Framed and hung, it has the charm of something caught in the act of being painted, a fragment of gold and rose that would sit well among more finished pieces without ever pretending to be one itself.
