Pierre Renoir (son of the artist)
Dalzell Hatfield Galleries, Los Angeles
Los Angeles County Museum of Art by 1955 (Sold: Sotheby's, Los Angeles, June 21, 1982, lot 79)
Private Collection, Wichita

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Art, Pierre August Renoir, July - October 1955, illustrated in the catalogue

Very Good Condition. Canvas is lined. Under UV light, 5 pinhead-size dots of inpainting fluoresce around all edges, otherwise fine.
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By the turn of the century, Renoir was enjoying tremendous critical and financial success as an artist. Renoir took greater liberty with his stylistic approach to painting and looked at the work of the Old Masters, notably Titian and Rubens for inspiration. "In 1905... Renoir was deliberately rejecting, it seems, some of the most notorious aspects of Impressionism. Backgrounds were painted in thinly over the white priming, but the principal areas of the figure were normally treated more opaquely. His touch remained fluent and supple, modeling forms with the loaded brush without any return to the linearity of his experimental work of the 1880s. After 1905, his color schemes began to grow warmer and his touch more mobile. Soft varied nuances were threaded through his fingers, and his backgrounds began to be treated, at times, with a more emphatic touch, which draws them into an active relationship with the main subject. This process of surface enrichment ushered in the ebullience of his last works." (John House, Renoir, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1985, p. 268)

Renoir's interest in the female form intensified in his later years. he was particularly drawn to the depiction of women in different stages of undress. Painted in 1902, Jeune Femme avec une Rose dans les Cheveux personifies the aesthetic goals in portraiture that Renoir pursued during his illustrious career. In the present work, the sitter poses in classic Renoir fashion. Loosely clad, she is seductive yet innocent of her ebulient sexuality as evidenced by her carefree countenance while exposing her breast. The sitter wears roses in her hair, an attribute in Renaissance and later art associated with Aphrodite, the goddess of love and fertility. Colin B. Baily writes, "What distinguishes [his portraits] from those of Renoir's Salon contemporaries is the extraordinary light with which they are imbued, 'the natural light of day penetrating and influencing all things,' which transforms and radicalizes Renoir's figures set in interiors." ( Bailey, Renoir's Portraits, New Haven, 1997, p. 20) Renoir conveys both the relaxed pose of the sitter and the effects of daylight with a fluid pattern of brus♛hwork that gives the entire composition a fe𓄧el of spontaneity.