Young Woman in White Reading

In the summer of 1873 Renoir went out to Argenteuil, the riverside town just outside Paris where Claude Monet was living, and the two painted alongside each other. This small canvas comes out of that visit. The woman in white, reading in profile with a flower in her hair, may be Monet's wife Camille, whom Renoir showed reading on several occasions. The handling is the real subject. The brushwork is loose and rapid, the paint thin, the surface left looking almost unfinished, which is just what the two men were pushing each other toward that summer. The picture sits on the line between a portrait and a plain scene of modern life, a woman doing nothing more than reading on an ordinary afternoon. The date is worth holding onto. The following year, in 1874, Renoir would hang canvases handled just this freely in the first Impressionist exhibition, where a hostile critic turned the word impressionist into a jibe.