Seated Woman in Profile

Renoir painted this young woman around 1915, in a white chemise with red straps and an orange-red skirt, her head propped on one hand as she looks away to the right. In the photograph here she has no frame. At the Museum Langmatt in Baden she hangs in a much heavier one, a hand-carved Italian frame from the 17th century. Renoir liked exactly that kind of border. His son Jean wrote that his father would accept only old carved wooden frames from the reigns of Louis XIV and Louis XV, with gilding that shone as if new. This frame was cut down and refitted at some point, and at the top left and bottom right corners the carved ornament no longer lines up. In 2022 the Langmatt showed many of its Renoirs unframed or in new frames, in an exhibition called Renoir unplugged, to test how much a border changes the way a painting reads.