眠る少女

Renoir painted this in 1880, near the end of the loose, sun-warmed Impressionist manner he would soon begin to doubt. Within a couple of years he grew dissatisfied with all that softness and went off to study the firm drawing of the old masters in Italy, so a picture like this belongs to the last stretch of his purely Impressionist years. The model was Angele, a young flower-seller from Montmartre who often sat for him. She has dozed off in a wide flowered hat and a striped stocking, a small cat asleep in her lap, and Renoir sets the warmth of her skin against the soft grey fur. He is not after a story, only the ordinary sight of someone who has genuinely fallen asleep in a chair. Look at how her head has simply dropped to one side and her hand gone slack on the cat.