Portrait of Jeanna Samary

Jeanne Samary was 21 and already a star at the Comédie-Française, Paris's great state theater, when Renoir painted her here in 1878. He was close to her circle and painted her about a dozen times in these years. This is the grand, full-length version he sent to the 1879 Salon, hoping to win over critics who had shrugged at an earlier portrait. They shrugged again. The picture later hung in Moscow, in the collection of the industrialist Ivan Morozov, until the Soviet state seized it after the 1917 Revolution and it passed in time to the Hermitage. Samary herself died young, of typhoid, at 33.