Girl with Basket of Fish (Pêcheuse de poissons)

On 19 April 1891 Renoir's dealer Paul Durand-Ruel bought a pair of narrow panels from him for his own Paris apartment, a girl carrying fish and a girl carrying oranges. Those were the years Durand-Ruel was shipping Impressionist pictures to New York, where his exhibition of 1886 had opened a market Paris was slow to give him.

This canvas is Renoir's version of the first of that pair, 130 centimetres tall and only 41 wide, a shape made to fit an interior. The Barnes Foundation, which owns it, reads the two girls as an allegory of nature's plenty, the fruits of the sea beside the fruits of the orchard. Behind this one are cliffs of the kind Renoir painted in Normandy through the 1880s, and behind her companion is a bay closer to Naples, which he had seen in 1881. The picture reached Philadelphia through the dealer Ambroise Vollard and appears on Albert Barnes's inventory of 1926.