Junge Frau mit Schleier

Renoir made this around 1876, in the middle of the years when he and his friends were mounting their own independent exhibitions in Paris, having given up on the official Salon. The picture is quiet and small, a young woman seen almost in profile under a hat, with a thin dark veil dropping over her face. That veil is really the subject. Renoir uses it to show what loose Impressionist brushwork could do that smooth academic painting could not: suggest a gauze you can see straight through, softening her features without hiding them. It hangs in the Musee d'Orsay, and Renoir never recorded who she was.