Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Ambroise Vollard, Paris

Sale: Galerie Charpentier Paris, 18 June 1957, lot 227 (titled La fille en rose)

Galerie Hopkins Thomas, Paris

Ruth O'Hara Gallery, New York

Private collection, USA

Private collection, New York (acquired from the above in November 2015)

This work will be included in the forthcoming Pierre-Auguste Renoir Digital Catalogue Raisonné, currently being prepared under the sponsorship of the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, Inc.

In the 1890s Renoir had developed a very intimate style of portraiture that was well suited to portraying the family members, friends and neighbours he asked to pose for him. As Barbara E. White has observed, these works are 'intimate studies in which the visible strokes create a lively snapshot effect. Renoir treated his figures as models in active scenes; these are not meant to be revealing character studies. Consequently, he blurred the distinction between making a portrait of someone and using that person as a model' (Impressionists Side by Side, New York, 1966, p. 91).

The present work belonged at one time to Ambroise Vollard, a French art dealer who was regarded as one of the most important dealers in French contemporary art at the beginning of the twentieth century. Vollard bought hundreds of paintings by Renoir, who was to become one of his favourite artists, and even encouraged him to practise sculpture. Renoir later confessed: “If I have tried my hand at sculpture, it was not with the aim of annoying Michelangelo, nor was it because painting was no longer enough for me, but because Mr. Vollard very gently forced me into it.”