The Dancer

A pale-skinned girl in an arctic-blue ballet costume stands facing us, her feet in the turned-out fifth position, her honey-brown hair tied with a sky-blue ribbon, one hand toying with the filmy layers of the tutu that floats about her like a cloud against a ground of spring and pine green. Auguste Renoir signed and dated the canvas 1874, the year he showed it in the first exhibition of the painters soon to be called Impressionists, where the dancer was singled out for the realism and grace of its conception; although the model is almost certainly the young actress Henriette Henriot, Renoir never identified her, presenting instead an image of poised adolescence on the edge of the stage. The gauzy tulle of the skirt, dissolved into the hazy background in a tour de force of handling, marks the moment his brushwork turned from the firm contours of his earlier manner toward the broken touch of high Impressionism. The painting came to the National Gallery of Art in 1942 with the Widener Collection. The painting is held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.