Portrait of the Countess of Pourtalès

In April 1877 Renoir showed his Bal du moulin de la Galette at the third Impressionist exhibition in Paris, a crowd of working people dancing under the trees of Montmartre. That same year he painted this sitter, who came from a very different Paris. Mélanie de Pourtalès, born Mélanie de Bussière, had married the financier Count Edmond de Pourtalès and had been one of the leading ladies of Napoleon III's court, close to Empress Eugénie. By 1877 that court had been gone for seven years, swept away by the defeat of 1870. The São Paulo museum that owns the portrait reads it as a picture caught between two manners, with old-fashioned dark modelling in places and quick Impressionist brushwork in others. It arrived there in 1952, the gift of a group of São Paulo donors that included the Antarctica brewery.