Mujer con jabot blanco

1880 was the year the Impressionists stopped behaving as a group. Renoir, Monet and Sisley stayed away from the exhibition the others put on that April and sent work instead to the official Salon, where the buyers and the portrait commissions were. This canvas belongs to that stretch, signed and dated 80 in the corner, and small, about 46 centimetres high. Nobody has identified the woman. She is painted close up and quickly, with white lace at the throat and a flower, the kind of picture that could be finished in a sitting and sold to a private buyer without passing through any exhibition. That same year Renoir broke his right arm and worked for weeks with his left. The picture entered the national collections in 1961 with the gift of the collector Eduardo Mollard, and moved to the Orsay when it opened in 1986.