Bildnis der Schauspielerin Jeanne Samary

In the spring of 1877 the Impressionists mounted their third group show, and Renoir hung this portrait of a young actress there, where much of the press treated the loose, flickering brushwork as an unfinished mess. The sitter was Jeanne Samary, a rising star of the Comédie-Française who had debuted two years earlier and lived just up the road from Renoir. He shows her against a soft rose-coloured haze in a blue-green dress, smiling and half lost in thought at the same time, which is why the picture is sometimes just called The Daydream. He would paint her more than once. This canvas later entered the great Moscow collection of Ivan Morozov, was taken over by the Soviet state after the Revolution, and by 1970 was familiar enough in Russia to appear on a postage stamp.