Madame Henriot in Costume

On the Paris stage of the 1870s a young actress was often cast as a boy, a page or a young lover, in what was called a travesti or trouser role. Renoir dressed his favourite model of these years, the Odéon actress Henriette Henriot, as exactly that kind of page. She stands before a red velvet curtain with a corner of the theatre behind her, in a slashed doublet buttoned down the front, the costume of a Renaissance page. The part may be Urbain, the queen's page in Meyerbeer's opera Les Huguenots, then hugely popular in Paris. Henriot sat for Renoir constantly between 1874 and 1876, for several of his full-length pictures. He was 35 and still years from steady success, painting the theatre world he loved. The picture is now in Columbus, Ohio.