Description
A mother in a broad straw hat sits sideways in a wicker chair, one arm braced against its curved back, nursing an infant who is wrapped in white linen and propped on her lap so that two chubby bare feet stick out toward the viewer. She wears a loose orange-red jacket over a heavy blue skirt that spills off the chair in thick, sculptural folds, and a small tabby and white cat sits alert at her feet, looking up toward the pair. Behind them a garden dissolves into loose strokes of blue, green and gold, with the dark trunk of a tree arching in from the upper right corner and a scatter of yellow blossom above.
Compared to Renoir’s other treatments of the same nursing subject, this one is painted with a lighter, more broken touch, the foliage built from short flickering strokes of blue-green and ochre that let real Impressionist light play across the whole background. The straw hat is rendered in warm gold with a soft blue-grey underside of brim shading the mother’s face, and her features, calm and slightly turned toward the viewer, are picked out with more finish than the sketchy garden around her. Orange, blue and gold recur throughout the canvas, from the jacket to the sky to the touches of yellow flower and cat fur, giving the whole picture a warm, sunlit unity.
Painted a year after an earlier, more sober version of the same subject, this canvas shows Renoir loosening his brush again and letting outdoor light back into a scene of everyday domestic tenderness, a mother, a nursing baby and a curious cat gathered under a tree. The wicker chair’s woven pattern, picked out in quick tan and brown lines, adds textural interest low in the composition, while the wide range of warm and cool color across a fairly large canvas gives it enough visual incident to hold a wall on its own.
