Lucie Bérard (Bambina in bianco)

1883 was the year Renoir decided Impressionism had run out for him. He had come back from Italy convinced he could not draw, and he began hardening his outlines into what he afterwards called his sour manner. That same spring Durand-Ruel gave him a one-man show of about 70 pictures in Paris, his first. This small head belongs to the same months. The sitter is Lucie Berard, youngest child of Paul Berard, a diplomat and banker whose house at Wargemont near Dieppe took Renoir in for whole summers. Berard was delighted with the portrait and could not persuade anyone else of it. He wrote that it was so unlike the sort of thing the fashionable portraitist Henner produced that it simply frightened people away.