Portrait of Stéphane Mallarmé

By 1892 the Impressionists were no longer outsiders, and one of the people quietly helping that along was the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who spent that spring pressing officials to let Impressionist canvases into France's national museums. Renoir had known him since the 1870s, part of the same Paris circle of painters and writers who met on Tuesday evenings at Mallarmé's flat. This is a small thing, barely 50 centimetres tall, a bust of a friend rather than a commission. Renoir keeps it plain and close, the poet's face turned slightly, the collar and moustache brushed with the same soft touch he gave sitters at their ease. Mallarmé kept the portrait until his death six years later.