Femme Se Peignant

Renoir painted this around 1907, in the hills above Cagnes on the Mediterranean, where he now spent his winters. It went to Isaac de Camondo, a Paris banker from a family of Constantinople financiers, who was putting together one of the sharpest collections of recent French painting in the city. Camondo died in 1911 and left the lot to the Louvre, on the condition that it stay together and hang as one collection. In principle the Louvre took no living artists at all. Those went to the Luxembourg museum across the river. The bequest walked Manet, Degas, Monet and Renoir straight past that rule, and Renoir himself was 70 and still working when his canvas went in. The picture moved to the Musee d'Orsay in 1986 and still carries the inventory number the Louvre gave it.