La lecture du rôle

This panel is nine centimetres by seven, small enough to sit in the palm of a hand. Renoir painted it around 1876, the spring the Impressionists held their second group show in Durand-Ruel's gallery on the rue Le Peletier in Paris, where he hung 15 pictures and the reviews were mostly hostile. He was 35 and spending his time among theatre people and Montmartre dancers. The scene is a young woman listening while a man reads a part aloud to her. For years she was taken for Jeanne Samary, an actress of the Comedie-Francaise whom Renoir portrayed in 1877, though comparison with those portraits has made the identification look unlikely and the Reims museum no longer puts her name to it. The picture reached Reims in 1907 from Henry Vasnier, who ran the Pommery champagne house in the city and left it his collection.