Portrait of Misia Sert (Jeune femme au griffon)

Portrait of Misia Sert (Jeune femme au griffon), 1907, depicts one of the most artistically connected women in Belle Époque Paris — Misia Godebska-Natanson-Edwards-Sert, who moved through the overlapping worlds of Post-Impressionism, Symbolism, and the Ballets Russes as a central social figure. She had been the model and muse of Toulouse-Lautrec, Vallotton, and Bonnard, the intimate friend of Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine, and would later become the confidante of Sergei Diaghilev, helping to launch the career of Coco Chanel. Renoir's portrait with the griffon dog belongs to a tradition of depicting socially prominent women with their pet dogs that runs back through eighteenth-century French portraiture, and his choice to paint Misia at this moment of her transition from the Post-Impressionist world to the world of the Ballets Russes captures her at the height of her cultural significance. The painting is one of the most formally ambitious portraits in his late production.

The figure-with-dog composition creates an intimate, domestic scale. Renoir models Misia's face with warm, blended flesh tones and paints the griffon with freely applied short strokes suggesting its wiry coat. The background is loosely indicated, ensuring the figure and animal read as a unified compositional group.