Frau im Park

This is a very small painting, about 26 centimetres tall. Renoir made it in 1866, when he was 25 and short of money, staying with his friend the painter Jules Le Coeur at Marlotte, a village at the edge of the Fontainebleau forest where lodging and models were cheap and you could work outdoors all day. The Salon jury in Paris rejected his submission that spring, and Daubigny, who sat on the jury and thought well of the picture, is said to have argued for it. Nothing is recorded about this canvas before the 1950s, when it belonged to the couturier Edward Molyneux in Paris. He sold it in 1955 to Ailsa Mellon Bruce, who was buying small French paintings by the dozen, and her bequest brought it to Washington in 1970.