Woman with Parrot

Renoir painted this in 1871, in the strange quiet after the Franco-Prussian War, from which he had just come home. The war had ended in defeat for France and, that spring, in the bloody weeks of the Paris Commune, but almost none of that shows here. Instead there is a dim, plush green room and a young woman in black taffeta teasing a small parrot on her finger. She is Lise Tréhot, who had modelled for Renoir for years and appears in more than a dozen of his paintings. This is close to the last of them. The following spring Lise married another man and stepped out of his life, and he seems never to have painted her again.