Girl with a Hoop

By 1885 Renoir had pulled away from the loose Impressionist handling he had helped invent. A trip to Italy a few years earlier sent him back towards firmer outlines and smoother finish, and that harder manner is what the families who commissioned portraits from him got. Etienne Goujon, a doctor who sat in the French Senate, ordered this one of his daughter Marie, who was nine. Renoir painted her close to life size, standing outdoors against greenery in a blue dress with a sash, holding the hoop that children her age rolled along the paths of every Paris park. His own first son had been born that March. The picture stayed in the family for 35 years, until Marie's husband sold it in 1920.