Portrait of Nini Lopez

In 1876 Renoir was working out of a rented studio on the rue Cortot in Montmartre, and the young woman in front of him came by almost every day. Her name was Nini Lopez, a local girl the neighbourhood teasingly called Gueule-de-Raie, fish-face, though Renoir kept her on because she was serious and punctual. She sat for him right through his best year, the same months he was painting the crowded, sun-dappled Dance at the Moulin de la Galette a few streets away. Later laboratory study of this canvas found something odd underneath her: Renoir had taken an old horizontal landscape, turned it upright, and stitched strips onto the sides, so a faint earlier picture still lies beneath her face and the edges stay half-sketched. The next year she married a minor actor from the Montmartre theatres and stopped coming to sit for him.