Le garçon au chat

In 1868 Renoir, still at the start of his career, finally had a success at the Paris Salon. After rejections in 1866 and 1867, the jury accepted a large open-air portrait of his model Lise Tréhot holding a parasol. That same year he painted this boy, and it follows none of the Salon's habits for a nude. Nothing in it points to mythology, the usual cover for bare skin on those walls. A boy stands with his back to us, hugging a cat, and glances over his shoulder. Nobody knows who he was.

The Musée d'Orsay notes that it is the only male nude in Renoir's whole work, and sees the older painters Courbet and Manet behind its solid handling and cool colours. Its first owner was Edmond Maître, a friend of Renoir and of the painter Frédéric Bazille. It later passed through a Berlin collection and a Japanese one before the museum bought it at auction in New York in 1992.