Lise Sewing

Renoir painted this around 1867, when he was in his mid-twenties and still years away from the loose, bright manner that would make his name. The young woman bent over her stitching is Lise Tréhot, who modelled for nearly every female figure he painted between 1866 and 1872 and was, for a while, his companion. There is no pose here. She does not look up, caught instead in a plain domestic moment, absorbed in the needle. Renoir keeps the setting dark and lets a few notes of red carry it, a ribbon in her hair and small drops at her ears. Tréhot later married and raised four children, and she left this canvas and one other by Renoir to them. Both hang today in Dallas.