Young Woman Sewing

In 1879 Renoir stepped away from his Impressionist friends. He skipped their fourth group show that spring and sent work to the official Salon instead, where a large portrait of the publisher's wife Madame Charpentier with her two children brought him real success. Small canvases like this one were the other side of that year, painted for private collectors rather than for crowds. A young woman bends over her needlework beside a vase of flowers. The Art Institute points out how cobalt blue runs through almost everything, broken by the reds of the bouquet and only a few touches of yellow. In the top left corner he signed it with the short date, 79. Its first owner was the Paris collector Charles Deudon, and in 1931 a Chicago newspaper photographed Annie Coburn at home with this painting on the wall behind her, two years before she left it to the museum.