La Coiffure

By 1888 Renoir had spent several years deliberately working against the loose, flickering manner he had helped invent. A trip to Italy in 1881 had turned his head. In Rome he studied Raphael, and back home he came to admire the hard, clear line of the older French painter Ingres. Through the 1880s he tightened his drawing, cooled his colour, and set firm outlines around his figures, most of them nudes and women at their toilette. By the time he painted this, that experiment was already loosening, the edges beginning to soften back toward warmth. The subject stayed the same though: a young woman with her arms raised, doing her hair, the coiffure the title names.