Seated Girl

Renoir signed this in 1909, and in April 1910 the banker Isaac de Camondo bought it, barely a year old. Camondo died the following year and left the French state about 750 works, on condition that they be accepted whole and kept together in rooms carrying his name for 50 years. Until then the Louvre kept a rule that a painter had to be ten years dead before his work could enter, and the bequest forced an exception. When the Camondo rooms opened in the summer of 1914, Renoir was 73 and still working, with this canvas already on a Louvre wall. The girl in it is Hélène Bellon, born in 1890, so 18 or 19 when she sat for him. It stayed in the Louvre until 1986, when the Impressionist collections crossed the Seine to the new Musée d'Orsay.