Madame Édouard Bernier (Marie-Octavie-Stéphanie Laurens, 1838-1920)

Renoir was 30 and in uniform. Conscripted in the war against Prussia, he was sent to a cavalry regiment that never saw combat, and in the spring of 1871 he was staying at Tarbes in the far south-west with the family of his regiment's commander. He remembered two months of being treated like a prince, riding every morning and giving the daughter of the house painting lessons. This is the commander's wife, Marie-Octavie Bernier, then 33. While he sat there painting her, Paris was under the Commune, and in the last week of May the army retook the city street by street. He came back that year to a capital where the Tuileries palace and the city hall had been burned out.