Head of a Woman

In 1876 Renoir took rooms in the rue Cortot on the hill of Montmartre so that he could work close to the Moulin de la Galette, the open-air dance garden a few streets away. The big canvas of the dancers he painted that summer is full of people he actually knew, friends and neighbourhood women who would sit for an afternoon. This small head comes from the same year and the same circle. The Hermitage catalogues it as a study, the brushstrokes left separate and visible. It does not name the woman. Her face resembles several who recur in his pictures of the mid-1870s, and the museum goes no further than suggesting Anna, one of the models he was using then.