Seated Girl in striped Skirt

In 1894 a new baby arrived in Renoir's household in Montmartre, his second son, Jean, and with him came extra help. Gabrielle Renard, a teenage cousin of Renoir's wife Aline, joined the family to look after the child, and she soon became one of the painter's most frequent models. Small pictures of young women at rest, like this one, belong to that domestic world of the mid-1890s. A girl sits on a plain chair in a striped skirt, her head bowed, on a canvas less than half a metre tall. The sitter is sometimes identified as Gabrielle, although the museum's title calls her only a seated girl. The Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen dates the canvas to 1895 or 1896.