Study of a Woman

Neither the museum in Boston nor the one in Potsdam has ever put a name to this young woman. Renoir painted her around 1893, her head and shoulders filling a canvas about 55 centimetres tall, and the Museum Barberini notes how compactly the figure sits in the frame, a kind of portrait that goes back to the Italian Renaissance. After that the picture's life ran through the art market. Ambroise Vollard, the Paris dealer, bought it straight from Renoir and reproduced it in his 1918 album of the painter's work. In 1949 the Boston collector William Coolidge found it at a London gallery, and at his death in 1993 he left it to the Museum of Fine Arts. The museum sold it at Sotheby's in New York in November 2011, and it passed into the collection of Hasso Plattner, the co-founder of SAP, which hangs in Potsdam. Renoir's signature sits at the lower left, so faint it is barely visible.