Woman with a Hat

Renoir sold this canvas to his dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, on 11 June 1891. Those were the months when he was leaving behind the hard, Ingres-like outlines of the 1880s and mixing white into his colours again for a softer, shimmering surface, and the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo counts this among the first works of that new manner. The picture was still with Durand-Ruel's firm 30 years later, when Kojiro Matsukata, a shipbuilding magnate from Kobe, bought it on 31 December 1921. Like much of what he collected, it stayed in Paris. In 1944 the French government sequestered it as enemy property, and after Japan signed the San Francisco peace treaty it passed to the French state in 1952. France transferred it to Japan in January 1959, and that April it entered the museum in Tokyo built to house the returned Matsukata collection.