Description
She stands close to the picture plane, hands loose at her sides, one holding a thin stalk of something, wheat or grass, that trails off toward the bottom edge of the canvas. Her hair is the real event here: a mass of reddish-blond curls, painted in long looping strokes that pick up gold, copper, and streaks of white where the light catches individual locks, spilling past her shoulders and nearly swallowing the top of her dress.
Her dress is a rust-red bodice, torn or fraying at the shoulder seams so a white blouse shows through underneath, worn over a long skirt in the same warm red-brown as the hair around it, so the whole figure reads as one continuous field of warm colour broken only by the pale oval of her face. Dark, slightly wary eyes and a small, unsmiling mouth give her an expression that is watchful rather than posed, a child sizing up whoever is looking at her.
The background is deliberately vague, built from the same rust and gold palette as the dress, thick dry brushwork suggesting a hedge or bank of foliage rather than any specific place, with a patch of white birch trunk and dark green leaves breaking through at the upper right. Renoir keeps the whole canvas warm and close in tone, almost monochrome except for that face and the flash of white at the collar and cuffs. Children and young models from outside his own family recur through his portrait work as often as paid commissions do, painted with the same close, warm attention he gave his own household.
The effect is intimate rather than decorative, a single figure filling the frame with very little space to spare around her, which makes it read strongly even from across a room where the mass of red-gold hair and the pale face stand out clearly against the darker greens behind.
