Ragazzo con la frusta

By the mid-1880s Renoir had lost faith in Impressionism. He felt he had reached the end of loose, flickering brushwork and went back to study Ingres and Raphael, hunting for firm drawing again, what he later called his 'hard' manner. You can see that argument inside this single canvas from 1885. The boy's face is drawn with clean, deliberate line, while the garden behind him dissolves into the old shimmering touch. The child is Etienne Goujon, about five years old, the son of a French senator, dressed in the skirts and long hair that little boys still wore in the 1880s and that can read as a girl to modern eyes. The painting is now in the Hermitage, in Saint Petersburg.