La Fontaine ou Jeune fille près d'une fontaine

By 1885 Renoir had quietly walked away from the movement that made his name. A trip to Italy a few years earlier had left him restless with the soft, dissolving light of Impressionism, and he wanted the firmer drawing he had admired in Raphael. You can feel that pull here. The young woman in white is set down with real weight, one foot raised, caught mid-step as she steadies herself near the water. Yet the warmth never leaves. The color still shimmers the way only Renoir's does, and the loose brush keeps something of the 18th-century painters he loved, Fragonard and Watteau, with their easy pleasure in a figure at play. He painted this at the height of his powers, and it later passed through Vollard and Bernheim-Jeune, two of the dealers who built the Paris market for Impressionism.