Porträt der Lucie Bérard (Kleines Mädchen mit weißer Schürze)

In the summer of 1884 Renoir was at Wargemont, a country house above the Normandy coast near Dieppe. It belonged to Paul Bérard, a diplomat from a family of Protestant bankers, who had met the painter at a Paris salon a few years earlier and then had him back every summer from 1879. What Bérard offered was rare for Renoir at that point, a house where he could stay for weeks and a family willing to sit. He painted its doors and its walls, the garden, the road outside, and over and over the four Bérard children. Lucie was the youngest, born in 1880, so about four years old when she stood for this. She turns up again in the large group picture made at Wargemont that same summer, the smallest of the three girls, down on the floor with a doll.