Girl with a Jump Rope (Portrait of Delphine Legrand)

Girl with a Jump Rope (Portrait of Delphine Legrand) of 1876 depicts a specific named child model — Delphine Legrand, daughter of a Montmartre family — in the characteristic childhood activity of jumping rope, combining portraiture with genre subject in the way that distinguished his best figure painting of the 1870s from purely conventional portraiture. The jump rope introduced movement and outdoor activity into the composition, and the challenge of suggesting a child in motion — the rope looped above her head, the expectation of movement implied — gave the painting a dynamic quality unusual in formal child portraiture. Renoir was living in the Montmartre neighborhood of Paris in the mid-1870s, and his figure models were drawn from the local community — laundresses, models from the neighborhood, the children of artisan and small-bourgeois families — giving his figure painting a specific social world and local identity. The 1876 date places this between the second and third Impressionist group exhibitions, during the period when his figure painting was gaining critical attention for its warmth, movement, and naturalistic ease. The Barnes Foundation acquired this canvas as a particularly vivid example of his Impressionist period child portraiture.

Renoir uses a warm, loosely Impressionist technique. Delphine's face is rendered with careful attention to likeness and expression — the slight seriousness of a child posing for a painter. The jump rope is a simple compositional line that gives the image its subject-specific character. Background is warm and indistinct.