Day Dreaming

In March 1875 Renoir talked Monet, Sisley and Berthe Morisot into putting 73 paintings up for auction at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris. The room heckled the canvases as they came up, and prices were so low that the four painters' receipts did not cover the costs of the sale. One Renoir landscape went for 55 francs. Something did come out of the afternoon. A customs official named Victor Chocquet was sitting in that room, liked what the crowd was jeering at, and within months he was buying Renoir's work and commissioning portraits of his wife and daughter. This head is from the same year. Renoir painted it in oil on paper, later laid down on canvas, and he cropped the sitter close and turned her away from us, a framing that portrait painters of the 1870s avoided.