Description
Both arms are raised over her head, hands lost in the crown of a straw hat as she settles it into place or lifts it off, and because of the angle we see the hat mostly from its back and top: a wide brim edged in white lace, a red ribbon wound around the crown and tied off in a soft, deliberately messy bow, a few sprigs of yellow trim caught at the side. It is a study of that hat as much as of the girl wearing it.
Her face tilts down and to the side, eyes lowered, cheeks flushed pink, hair a loose tangle of blond and honey-coloured strokes that Renoir barely separates from the straw of the hat itself, the two textures almost trading places. The dress is a warm rose pink, brushed on thin enough in places to let the ground show through, with a scrap of white lace collar at the throat picked out in a few quick strokes.
The background is where the paint gets freest: khaki, olive, and rust dragged together with no attempt at describing a specific place, just enough to suggest greenery or a garden without competing with the figure. A patch of pure blue at lower left and a cluster of yellow at upper right act almost like punctuation, small jolts of saturated colour against all that muted warmth. A figure seen from behind, caught mid-gesture rather than posed for the viewer, is a more private and experimental kind of picture than the sitting portraits that made up most of his commissioned work.
It is an intimate, slightly off-balance composition, cropped close, more about the gesture of arms lifted overhead than about a posed sitter, and that immediacy is what makes it interesting up close on a wall: the loose, unfinished-looking passages around the edges next to the more resolved patch of red ribbon and white lace at the centre.
