Mädchen mit Weizenähren — Mädchen mit Blumen

In 1888 Renoir painted the three daughters of Catulle Mendès, a Paris poet, seated at a piano. The São Paulo museum takes the girl here to be one of them, the youngest, Hélyonne, painted in the same year. It was a hard year for him. He had spent the middle of the decade in a tighter, drier manner he had come to dislike, and that winter a facial paralysis stopped him working for weeks. None of that is in the picture. The wheat and the leaves are loaded on thickly enough to hold the light and suggest the weight of the bundle she carries, while the face is smoother and much more lightly painted. The canvas has been in São Paulo since 1952, a gift from Santos Vahlis in the museum's first years.