Description
A young girl sits turned slightly toward the viewer, wearing a deep blue dress and a dark hat crowned with a burst of red-brown feathers. A bright red scarf circles her neck, and she holds an orange fan loosely across her lap, its warm color the strongest accent in the whole sheet. Her round face, softly flushed at the cheeks, looks out with a calm, direct gaze.
Worked in fluid washes rather than the thick oil paint of Renoir’s canvases, this piece has the immediacy of a watercolor sketch: the blue of the dress bleeds and pools at the edges, the background is laid in loose strokes of ochre and ivory, and a dim window or mirror is suggested at the right in pale violet-grey. The paper’s texture shows through everywhere, giving the whole scene a translucent, breezy quality.
Held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this study of a girl in blue makes a delicate wall art choice for a smaller space. Young Girl in a Blue Dress can be reproduced on museum-quality canvas in a range of sizes, made to order and shipped worldwide.
