La lettrice

When Renoir painted this in 1876, the Impressionists had held their first group show only two years earlier, and critics were still treating their loose, light-struck brushwork as a kind of joke. Here he turns it on a very ordinary thing: a young woman from Montmartre, lost in a book. Her name was Marguerite Legrand, called Margot, and Renoir kept coming back to her because, as he put it, her skin caught the light. You can see what he meant in the way her face and hands seem lit from the page itself. Margot died of typhoid three years later, still in her twenties. The painting reached the French state through the collection of the painter Gustave Caillebotte, a friend, who left it to the nation.