Girl with a Basket of Fish

The working-class child figure occupied an ambiguous position in French academic painting: either sentimentalized into picturesque poverty or rendered with the unsentimental social criticism of Courbet and his followers. Renoir's 1875 Girl with a Basket of Fish at the National Gallery of Art belongs neither category. The child carries fish — a detail from the world of market labour rather than bourgeois leisure — yet the painting's warmth refuses to convert this economic fact into social commentary. This tension between the democratic breadth of his subject matter and his consistent warmth of feeling was central to Renoir's position within Impressionism. He was less politically committed than Pissarro and less socially astringent than Degas, but his range of subjects extended far beyond the bourgeois entertainments he is most associated with in popular memory. The fish basket, with its silver-grey tones providing a cool accent against warm flesh and a neutral background, was chosen partly as a compositional and chromatic element, the artist's formal interests inseparable from his social observation. The NGA pair with the companion Girl with a Basket of Oranges shows him thinking about these working-class girl figures as complementary chromatic studies as much as social documents.

Renoir renders the girl with characteristic warm flesh tones set against the cooler, more neutral tones of her clothing. The fish basket is loosely indicated, its silver-grey tones providing a cool accent. Background is unspecific and atmospheric, consistent with his plein-air method.