Graziella

The title comes from a book almost everyone in France had read. In 1852 Alphonse de Lamartine, the poet who had helped lead the provisional government of 1848, published Graziella, a short story drawn from his own youth in Naples. A young Frenchman lodges with a fisherman's family on the bay, falls in love with the granddaughter, goes home to France, and learns that she has died. It stayed in print for decades and was turned into plays. Renoir borrowed the name in 1896 for this picture of a girl, and the title does the work of placing her. It came through Durand-Ruel, the dealer who had carried the Impressionists through their thin years, and the city of Detroit bought it by 1920, which is why the label credits a city purchase rather than a collector.