Girl in Gray-Blue

Girl in Gray-Blue of 1889 belongs to Renoir's transitional late 1880s period, when he was moving away from the arid classicism of his mid-decade dry style and recovering the warmth and atmospheric quality of his Impressionist figure painting while retaining more formal clarity than his purely Impressionist middle period. The title refers to the clothing color — gray-blue was a cooler, more restrained palette choice than the vivid warm colors of his Impressionist period — and the chromatic choice suggests his continued engagement with the formal questions of color temperature and its relationship to the human figure that the Italian experience had raised. By 1889 he was developing what would become his late warm manner, and the gray-blue figure subject represented an experiment in warm-cool contrast within the figure painting genre. The Barnes Foundation's holding of multiple Renoir canvases from the transitional late 1880s period — a relatively neglected decade in his oeuvre — documents this period of formal searching that connected his great Impressionist work of the 1870s to the settled warmth of his late mature style.

The grey-blue of the girl's costume sets a cooler tonal keynote than Renoir usually employs, with skin modelled in relatively restrained warm tones rather than his usual roses. The compositional approach is more frontal and symmetrical than his loosest female studies, suggesting this was executed with more formal care. The background continues the cool tonal range without introducing strong contrast.