Madame Alphonse Daudet

Renoir painted this in 1876, the year he was also at work on his great sunlit scene of a dance garden in Montmartre. The sitter is Julia Daudet, a writer herself and the wife of the novelist Alphonse Daudet, whose stories of southern France were then hugely popular. Renoir made the portrait over about a month spent at the Daudets' home, and you can feel the ease of that acquaintance. Her face is softly focused, the dark hair loosely brushed in, the whole thing painted at conversational closeness rather than formal distance. This was still a risky manner for a portrait, and the second Impressionist exhibition that same year had drawn plenty of mockery. She looks past the painter, mid-thought, as if he had caught her between two remarks.