Bust of a Young Woman

In 1900 Paris held a world's fair, and inside it an official survey of a century of French art at last gave the Impressionists space of their own. Renoir had 11 paintings in it, and in August the French state made him a knight of the Legion of Honour. This small canvas comes from the same year. It is just over 15 centimetres tall, a young woman seen from the shoulders up, her fair hair laid in with a few thick, pale strokes, her face turned down and away from us against a background of quick greens. It belongs to the Museum Langmatt in Baden, Switzerland, the former house of the collectors Sidney and Jenny Brown.