Head of a Young Girl Doing Her Hair

On the last day of 1890 the Durand-Ruel gallery in Paris bought this small canvas straight from Renoir. It measures about 35 by 27 centimetres, and it catches him at a turning point. For several years in the mid-1880s he had drawn his figures with hard, clean contours, trying to steady Impressionism with something closer to classical drawing. By 1890 he was letting that go. Here the edges have softened again. The girl's cheek melts into the blond mass she is gathering up, and her fingers are buried in it. Behind her there is only a field of deep blue, and the signature sits at the lower right. In April 1926 it went to Frank Hadley Ginn and his wife Cornelia in Cleveland. Their family, and later a charitable trust in their name, kept it until 2000, when it was sold at Christie's in New York.