Portrait of Madame Darras

Renoir met the Darras family through Charles Le Coeur, an architect who was one of his earliest patrons, and Madame Darras was an army captain's wife. He painted her head first, small, on this canvas of about 48 centimetres, around 1868. Five years later he used it for a life-size picture of her on horseback in the Bois de Boulogne. The Salon of 1873 refused that larger painting, along with so much else that the state opened a second exhibition for the rejected work, and Renoir hung there. The following spring he was one of the founders of the first Impressionist exhibition. The horsewoman is in Hamburg now, and this study stayed in the Le Coeur collection for decades before the French state accepted it as a gift in 1965.