Reading

Most of Renoir's Paris paintings hang across the river in the Musee d'Orsay. This one is in the Louvre, and the reason is the way it arrived. It belonged to the banker Victor Lyon, who with his wife Helene gave their collection to the museum, and since 1977 it has been shown there under both their names in room 903 of the Sully wing, a private collector's wall kept together inside a state museum. The picture is a young woman reading, about 55 centimetres by 65. The Louvre's own catalogue dates it no more closely than the last quarter of the 19th century, though it is usually placed around 1892, in the years after Renoir married, when he painted his own household again and again.