Romaine Lacaux

Renoir was 23 when he painted this girl in 1864, and he had only recently stopped decorating porcelain for a living. That trade had put food on his table since boyhood, until factory machines learned to print the patterns he had painted by hand and the work dried up. You can see the training anyway in the face of Romaine Lacaux, in the soft, careful transitions of colour across her cheeks, the touch of someone used to laying delicate tints on a smooth surface. This may be his earliest signed canvas. The loose Impressionist brushwork was still years off. Here he is a young painter proving he could hold a likeness the way the Salon expected.