Romaine Lacaux

This portrait of a young girl framed in a garland of peonies and roses was painted in 1864, a decade before the first Impressionist exhibition and while Renoir was still finding his way between the styles available to a young painter in Paris. The crisp, glossy facture and the dark background reflect the examples of Courbet and of portraiture then in favour; Renoir had not yet developed the broken brushwork for which he is known. It survives as one of his finest early works, painted the year after he began exhibiting at the Salon.