Description
A small child fills almost the whole canvas, seen close up and slightly from below, so that the curly mass of light brown hair crowds against the top edge of the picture. The face is painted with far more finish than the surrounding hair and dress: smooth, pearly skin, two dark, wide-set eyes that catch a bright highlight, flushed pink cheeks and a small mouth left slightly open in red. Around that carefully modeled face, the hair dissolves into loose, curling strokes of gold, ochre and soft brown that blend into a warm, mottled reddish-brown background, so head and backdrop almost merge at the edges.
The child wears a white pinafore with a ruffled collar over a dark, almost black dress with scalloped shoulder pieces, the white built up in thick, confident strokes that catch the light and pull the eye back down from the face. There is very little else in the picture, no toys, no setting, nothing but the sitter and a warm brown field around her, which keeps the whole composition tightly focused on the face and the collar beneath it.
This kind of tender, close-cropped child portrait was one of Renoir’s specialties, when private portrait commissions of the children of friends and patrons kept him working steadily between the more ambitious figure paintings he showed at the Impressionist exhibitions. The contrast between the tightly finished face and the freely brushed hair and background shows his working method plainly: build the features with care, then let everything around them stay loose and atmospheric. Hung at eye level, the big, dark eyes and rosy color of the face carry the wall from across a room, while the soft brown tones keep the picture from ever feeling cold.
