Gabrielle in the Garden

The Musée de l'Orangerie says it plainly: Gabrielle is only a pretext here. She was Gabrielle Renard, the family's nanny, one of Renoir's favourite models. Around 1905 he stood her on a garden path in a red blouse and a straw hat trimmed with flowers. The real subject is the sun. It bleaches the ground at her feet and drains the colour from the lower part of her blue apron. Renoir laid the paint on thin, in light, almost transparent rubs, which suit a picture about being dazzled. How the canvas reached the museum is unclear. It was with the dealer Ambroise Vollard in 1918, may have passed through a New York gallery in the 1930s, and ended up with Domenica Walter, the widow of the dealer Paul Guillaume, who listed it among the works she meant to leave to the Louvre.