Portrait of Madame Paul Berard

By 1879 Renoir had a new kind of patron. The year before, at the fashionable Paris salon of Madame Charpentier, he had met Paul Berard, a diplomat turned banker, who invited him up to the family chateau at Wargemont, on the Normandy coast near Dieppe. This is Berard's wife, Marguerite. Over the next several years Renoir would come back to Wargemont again and again, painting the children, the household, the gardens, while the Impressionist market in Paris was still thin and sales were slow. The portrait keeps the loose, quick touch of those visits. She is set against a plain ground, turned slightly, the collar and hair worked up in a few swift strokes.