The Beautiful Sicilian Woman

Renoir painted this in 1894, a warm year in his house near Paris. His second son, Jean, the future film director, was born that September, and a young cousin of his wife, Gabrielle Renard, had just arrived to help with the baby and would soon become his favourite model. By this time Renoir had left the broken light of his Impressionist years for something rounder and softer, young women with full faces and warm reddish hair painted in a smooth, pearly way. The title names no sitter and simply calls her a beautiful Sicilian woman. It was still a few years before the rheumatism that, from 1897 on, would slowly close his hands.