Description
A young woman looks straight out from the canvas, her head and shoulders filling most of the frame. Her hair is a bright coppery red, loose and full, framing a round, pale face with dark eyes and a faint smile. She wears a wide straw hat, cream at the brim and a deeper gold on the crown, piled with a cluster of pink and cream roses on one side.
Under the hat she’s dressed in a rust-orange coat over a black, high-necked collar that comes up close to her chin, the darkest note in the picture and one that makes the pale face above it read even brighter. The background is a soft, hazy mauve-gray, brushed thin and loose with none of the detail given to the face.
The paint is handled with real economy: broad, confident strokes for the coat and hat, a slightly tighter touch for the eyes, nose, and mouth, and almost no finish at all in the background, which is left as a scrubbed wash of lavender and pink. The roses on the hat are just a few loaded touches of pink and yellow, more suggestion than description, yet they read clearly from a distance.
It’s a straightforward head-and-shoulders study rather than an elaborate portrait, close in spirit to the many quick likenesses Renoir made of young models and family members through these years, valued as much for the color harmony as for any likeness. The red hair against the orange coat and gray-violet ground is the whole engine of the picture.
On a wall this holds up well at a distance: the warm red-orange mass of hair and coat sits forward against the cooler, quieter background, giving the piece a glow that carries across a room without needing to be read up close.
