Portrait of Mme. Paulin

By the late 1880s Renoir had talked himself out of Impressionism, at least for a while. A trip to Italy and a long look at Raphael's frescoes had left him worried that his soft, dissolving pictures held no drawing underneath, so he tightened up — firmer outlines, a cooler finish, a manner he later called his dry period. This portrait of Madame Paulin comes from those years, around 1887. The sitter herself has stayed obscure, but the handling shows the shift plainly: the face and the collar are drawn with a clear edge, not melted into the light the way his riverbank crowds of a decade earlier had been.