Signora Stephen Pichon

The sitter was the wife of Stephen Pichon, a journalist and diplomat then climbing through the politics of the French Third Republic, who would later serve several times as the country's foreign minister. Renoir painted her in 1895. By this stage he had drifted away from the loose, flickering Impressionism of his youth toward something firmer and more traditional, with warmer flesh tones and clearer drawing, the manner he kept for the rest of his life. He was in his mid-fifties. He would spend his final decades in the south of France at Cagnes, painting on through the arthritis stiffening his hands, and it is there, in the house that became the Musée Renoir, that this portrait now hangs.