Portrait of a Seated Woman

The small brass plate on the frame carries the names of the couple who gave this picture to the Louvre, Hélène and Victor Lyon, and their own faces hang in the same room. Hélène, born Loeb in 1883, was painted around 1900 by Jean-Jacques Henner, a fashionable Paris portraitist, and a second portrait, by Paul Merwart, shows her before her marriage. Renoir's sitter has no name. She is a young woman in a hat heaped with flowers and a rose-red dress, seated in an armchair, on a canvas only 35 centimetres high. The Louvre dates it no more closely than the late 19th or early 20th century.