Dalla modista

In 1878 Renoir stayed away from the Impressionist group show and sent a canvas to the official Salon instead, where the buyers and the commissions were. Small pictures like this one went by another route, straight to dealers and private hands.

It is a shop scene. Hats in Paris were made by hand in workrooms behind the sales floor, and the trade employed thousands of women in the city, in one of the few businesses a woman could run on her own account. Painters kept coming back to it. Degas began his long series of milliner pictures a few years after this, and in 2017 the Metropolitan Museum brought the whole subject together in one exhibition, with this canvas in it. It is barely larger than a sheet of writing paper, 33 by 25 centimetres, and it belongs to the Fogg Museum at Harvard.