Портрет мадемуазель Викторины де Беллио

Victorine de Bellio was the daughter of a man the Impressionists had reason to be grateful to. Her father, Georges de Bellio, was a Romanian doctor in Paris who bought their paintings in the lean years when almost no one else would, among them the Monet that gave the whole movement its name. Renoir painted his friend's daughter in 1892, the year before she married. She sits in soft focus, the brushwork loosened into the powdery pinks and greys of his late manner, more interested in the light on skin and fabric than in any sharp likeness. Long afterward, in 1957, Victorine gave her father's collection to a museum in Paris, and it is there, among the pictures he had rescued, that her own portrait now hangs.