Painting Detail
Young Woman in a Flowered HatArtist: Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Medium: Painting, Oil on canvas, 41.5x33 cm
Date: 1892
Genre: Portrait
Source: Formerly in the collection of Otto Krebs, Holzdorf
In the 1890s Renoir frequently painted the subject of a young woman in a hat. The artist had been partial to this theme in the past. The fancy ladies' hats of the end of the century further enlivened Renoir's interest. He liked them so much that sometimes he ordered especially unusual hats for his models. This chapeaux fantaisistes turned out to suit Renoir's women. The woman is painted not as a thinker or doer, or a housewife or worker, but as a creation of nature, and its ornament. Therefore, the liveliest colours of nature, luxuriant garden flowers, are quite appropriate here. The woman represented in this picture does not entirely correspond to the usual Renoir type of woman with a soft, oval face and a tiny, round nose. Perhaps this is not a model, but a lady who commissioned the portrait. The fact that the canvas was dated suggests as much, since as a rule pictures of models were not dated.