Julie Manet

The girl holding the cat is Julie Manet, about eight years old, the only child of the painter Berthe Morisot and Eugene Manet, brother of the more famous Edouard. The two families were close, and Julie's parents asked Renoir to paint her in 1887. It caught him in an unusual phase. For a few years around this time he had cooled on soft Impressionist brushwork and gone after firmer lines and a smooth, almost enamelled finish, in admiration of the old draughtsman Ingres. You can feel it in the clean edge of the girl's face against the cat's fur. Julie would lose both her parents by the age of 16 and grow up to keep a diary that is now one of the closest eyewitness records of the Impressionist circle.