Girl in a Lace Hat

By 1891 Renoir had come out the other side of a hard experiment. Through the mid-1880s he had tried to tighten his line and cool his colour, unhappy that Impressionism felt formless to him, and the results left buyers cold. Here he has loosened again: warm, quick strokes, a girl in a white lace hat trimmed with pink bows, looking away from him against a haze of blue and green. Easy, charming pictures like this were what sold in these years and steadied his finances. The painting now hangs a long way from Paris, in the Pola Museum in the hills of Hakone, in Japan.