Femme faisant du crochet

In March 1875 Renoir, Monet, Sisley and Berthe Morisot put about 70 canvases up for sale at the Hôtel Drouot auction rooms in Paris. The bidding was low and the room jeered, and Renoir's pictures went for roughly a hundred francs each, about what a Paris workman earned in a month.

Small interiors like this one come out of that stretch of his life. Nobody ordered it. A young woman sits with her needlework in ordinary clothes in an ordinary room, and the sunlight does most of the work, catching her hair and her bare shoulder. In 1916 the American collector Sterling Clark bought it as the first Renoir he ever owned. He went on to buy 37 more, and those are the core of the museum in Massachusetts that carries his name.