Woman with a Fan

In the late 1870s Paris was gripped by a craze for all things Japanese. Fans, prints and porcelain were arriving from a country that had only recently reopened to foreign trade, and they turned up everywhere in fashionable apartments. The flat, round fan this young woman holds is a Japanese uchiwa. The model may have been the actress Jeanne Samary, a favourite of Renoir's from the Comedie-Francaise, though the picture was conceived as a study of a face and a few bright notes of colour rather than a likeness of her. Her dress is Parisian, the fan is imported, and that easy mixing of the two is just what a viewer in 1879 would have read as fashionable. Renoir keeps the brushwork soft and quick, the way he liked a cheek and a fingertip to catch the light.