Jacques Bergeret as a Child

In April 1923 the Paris dealer Paul Rosenberg sold this small canvas to the London branch of Knoedler, which wrote it into its stock book simply as Tête d'Enfant, head of a child. Within two months it had passed through Knoedler's New York branch to the Howard Young Gallery in the same city, and that November it was bought by John Taylor Spaulding of Boston, who with his brother had already given the Museum of Fine Arts thousands of Japanese prints. His paintings followed by bequest in 1948. Renoir painted this head and shoulders around 1880, on a canvas barely 41 centimetres tall. The boy is now identified as Jacques Bergeret, though the museum's record says nothing more about him. The signature sits in the upper right corner.