Young Spanish Woman with a Guitar

In the Paris of the 1890s, Spain was in fashion. Bizet's opera Carmen had made a Spanish heroine and her world familiar on the stage, and the guitar itself was heard as a Spanish instrument. Renoir spent those years painting a series of young women holding guitars, reworking the same few props over and over. This is the one canvas where he put the model in Spanish costume, a short bolero jacket with a red and black arrangement pinned in her hair. He seems less interested in who she is than in those things, the curve of the instrument across her lap, the warm reds against the black, the soft fall of the jacket. Renoir was in his late 50s by now, his hands starting to stiffen with the arthritis that would eventually cripple them, and he was drifting away from the sharp modern scenes of his Impressionist youth toward gentler, more timeless subjects. The dealer Paul Durand-Ruel bought this picture straight from him in January 1899.