Girl with Pink Bonnet (Jeune fille au chapeau rose)

Girl with Pink Bonnet (Jeune fille au chapeau rose), 1894, belongs to Renoir's series of child and young girl head studies produced throughout the early 1890s when his own sons were very young and children were both practically available as models and personally significant as subjects. The pink bonnet — a traditional headdress for young girls that had by the 1890s an old-fashioned charm — frames the face in warm, chromatic sympathy with the girl's flesh tones, creating the kind of close colour harmony that Renoir valued more than sharp tonal contrast. His child portraits of this decade are technically among his most delicate works: the soft, barely modelled flesh of young faces required a gentler version of his mature figure-painting technique, and he met the challenge by simplifying his palette and softening his brushwork to match the smooth luminosity of young skin. The Barnes Foundation's group of child portrait studies documents this particular strand of his late-middle-period figural work with exceptional completeness.

The pink of the bonnet and the warm tones of the child's face are handled with closely related brushwork, integrating the two elements into a unified warm mass. Loose background strokes of green and blue provide colour contrast without sharp spatial definition. The face is modelled with Renoir's gentlest blended flesh tones.