Julie Manet

Julie Manet (1878–1966) had one of the most remarkable lives of any child who appears in Impressionist painting: the daughter of Berthe Morisot and the niece of Édouard Manet, she grew up at the heart of the Impressionist circle and later published a memoir of her childhood, Journal (1979), that remains one of the most invaluable first-hand accounts of the movement in its final decades. Renoir became her guardian after Berthe Morisot's death in 1895, and his portraits of her span her childhood from infancy through adolescence. The 1887 portrait at the Musée d'Orsay shows Julie at nine, in the middle of her childhood but already the subject of multiple significant portraits — Morisot herself painted her daughter constantly, and Renoir's version adds the perspective of an intimate family friend to the maternal observation of her mother's canvases. The difference between Morisot's intimate, psychologically penetrating portrayals of her daughter and Renoir's warmer, more generalizing portrait manner reveals the different personal relationships at work: Morisot was observing the child she had made, while Renoir was painting a beloved friend's daughter with the warmth of avuncular affection.

Renoir paints the young Julie with the careful attention of someone painting a known and beloved child, not an anonymous model. The face is more individually characterised than his generic female studies — sharper, more specific in feature. His warm, soft palette is deployed with particular tenderness here, the result being one of his most psychologically alert child portraits.