Young Mother (Jeune mère)

Renoir painted this in 1881, a restless year for him. He had helped invent Impressionism in the 1870s, and now, at 40, he was starting to doubt it. That autumn he traveled to Italy, and standing in front of Raphael's frescoes and the wall paintings dug out of Pompeii he decided his own work had grown too loose. Afterward his drawing tightened and his figures firmed up. This tender scene of a mother and small child sits just before that shift, still soft-edged and warm, the paint thinned to a near matte finish over a pale ground. It later crossed the Atlantic to Philadelphia, into the vast Renoir holdings of the chemist and collector Albert Barnes, who owned more of the painter than anyone.