A Waitress at Duval's Restaurant

Duval was a Paris butcher who built a chain of cheap restaurants, the bouillons, where a working person could get a plain hot meal for very little. The waitresses wore sober dark dresses and white aprons, so alike that a guidebook of the day compared them to sisters of charity. Renoir painted one of them around 1875, standing with her order pad, caught mid-shift. He showed the picture the next year at the second Impressionist exhibition, where critics liked its freshness and its unforced naturalism. There is no grand subject here, just a young woman at work in one of the new eating places feeding a fast-growing city. Her white scarf is looped loosely at the neck, already a little undone by the day.