Mademoiselle Marthe Le Cœur

At the end of 1873 Renoir and a circle of friends, Monet and Pissarro among them, set up a cooperative society of artists, and the following April it opened the first Impressionist exhibition in Paris. That same year the architect Charles Le Cœur, one of Renoir's steadiest patrons, bought a country house at Fontenay-aux-Roses, just south-west of the city, and this small portrait of his daughter Marthe was painted there. She was born in 1865, the third of his four children, and would later become Madame Paul Dupuy. Renoir put her in a blue dress with a white frilled collar and a dark bow in her hair, against a loosely brushed ground. The picture passed from her father to a Paris dealer and then, in 1924, to the banker and collector David David-Weill. That July it appeared in a magazine article presenting 15 Renoirs that had never been published.