Description
A woman stands in strict profile, her reddish hair pulled up and back, a woven wicker basket balanced on her forearm as her other hand reaches to adjust something inside it. She wears a soft grey-blue blouse buttoned to the neck, a wide dark sash at her waist, and a striped blue and white apron over a pale skirt, plain working clothes rendered with enough care to catch the light along every fold. Her cast shadow falls dark and sharp on the ground behind her, doubling her silhouette.
The entire background is a single blazing field of orange and red, laid on in broad, loose, almost abstract strokes with streaks of white and touches of dark brown breaking up the surface, giving no clue to actual setting, wall, field or sky. Against that heat, the woman’s cooler blue-grey clothing and the pale wicker of the basket stand out sharply, her profile drawn with a firm, clean edge rather than the soft, blended contour typical of Renoir’s Impressionist figures. A signature sits at the upper left corner.
Dated to 1884, this falls in Renoir’s dry, or Ingres-influenced, period, when he deliberately tightened his drawing and sharpened contour after feeling that pure Impressionism had left him without the means to describe solid form. The sculptural clarity of the profile and the flattened, decorative background color are both marks of that deliberate change in direction.
As wall art the picture is bold and graphic, the saturated orange ground giving it real punch from across a room, while the clean profile and quiet, everyday task keep the mood grounded and calm rather than showy.
