提水壶的女孩

Renoir painted this in 1876, right in the thick of the years when he and his friends were being laughed out of the Paris art world. The second Impressionist exhibition had just opened that spring, and critics were mocking these loose, bright canvases as unfinished. Here Renoir does something clever with that so-called sloppiness. Look at the little girl in her blue dress with the orange bow. Her face and her gaze are painted with real care, sharp and warm, while everything around her, the grass, the flowers, the path, dissolves into flecks of pink and green and lilac. He worked this kind of garden scene partly around Monet's place at Argenteuil, where several of the friends painted together. The child is thought to be a girl from his own neighbourhood. She holds her watering can and simply looks back at you.