Portrait of Margot

Renoir set his sitter in strict profile here, turned towards the left edge, and signed the canvas in the upper corner. She was Marguerite Legrand, known as Margot, a young woman from Montmartre who modelled for him again and again in the late 1870s. The French state dates this small portrait to 1878. Her reddish-blond hair is gathered under a dark hat, a white and blue scarf is knotted at her throat, and the brown background is scrubbed in thinly, lighter towards the left. Margot died in February 1879, aged 23. The picture later belonged to Paul Gachet, a doctor and amateur etcher at Auvers-sur-Oise who collected the Impressionists. His son gave it to the Louvre in 1951, two years after the family had given Van Gogh's portrait of the doctor himself.