Portrait of Madame Charpentier

Marguerite Charpentier was one of the best things to happen to Renoir's career. Her husband was a wealthy Paris publisher, and the salon she held at their house on the rue de Grenelle drew writers, politicians and painters all through the 1870s. She took to Renoir early, bought his work when almost no one else would, and commissioned portraits of herself and her children. This small head is one of the first of them, painted around 1876. Two years later she pushed him to exhibit at the official Salon again, and in 1879 she pulled strings to have his large portrait of her with her children hung in a place of honour there. Renoir was 38 by then, and it was the first time a wide public really took notice of his name.