Portrait of Marie-Zelie Laporte

Renoir painted this in 1864, when he was 23 and nobody. He was a student in Charles Gleyre's Paris studio, the same drawing school where he had just fallen in with Claude Monet, Frédéric Bazille and Alfred Sisley, the friends he would help launch Impressionism with about 10 years later. None of that is here yet. The sitter is Marie-Zélie Laporte, the 17-year-old sister of a fellow student, painted in sober greys with a careful, slightly melancholy correctness that any academy teacher would have approved. The bright, loose Renoir was still years off. The portrait hangs today in Limoges, the central French city where Renoir was born in 1841.