Portrait of a Young Child

This portrait is barely 21 centimetres tall, and no one knows who the child is. Renoir painted it around 1895, and according to notes attached to a 1958 appraisal it once belonged to Ambroise Vollard, the Paris dealer who sold much of his later work. Vollard died in 1939 and his estate was divided. His brother Lucien sold a large part of his share, 429 Renoir paintings, drawings and watercolours, to the dealer Martin Fabiani. In 1940, with France under German occupation, Fabiani tried to ship that hoard to the United States by way of Bermuda. It was seized there because of where it came from, and the pictures sat out the war in Canada until they were released to him in May 1949. Whether this little portrait was in that shipment the Museum of Fine Arts cannot say, because the descriptions are too vague. What is known is that it turned up in New York collections in the 1950s, and in the early 1970s Dr Harold Tannenbaum and his wife, of Brookline, gave it to the museum.