Portrait de Madame Renoir

Renoir painted this in 1885, the summer after his companion Aline Charigot gave birth to their first son, Pierre. They were not yet married. That came five years later, in 1890. He shows her in a straw hat trimmed with roses, a young countrywoman from the village of Essoyes in Champagne, where the family had gone to escape the Paris heat. Aline had modelled for Renoir for years by then, most famously as the woman playing with the little dog in his Luncheon of the Boating Party. This is the first portrait he made of her as the mother of his child, and he kept it for himself for the rest of his life.