Portrait of Misia Sert

Portrait of Misia Sert (1904), at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, depicts one of the great cultural figures of Paris's Belle Époque: Misia Godebska, who became successively Misia Natanson, Misia Edwards, and finally Misia Sert. She was the muse and intimate friend of Toulouse-Lautrec, Bonnard, Vuillard, and Renoir himself, and she moved at the centre of the Revue Blanche circle that brought together the most adventurous painters, writers, and musicians of the period. Renoir's portrait captures her at thirty-two, in the middle phase of a life lived at the intersection of art and patronage.

Renoir brings to the portrait of Misia his full command of feminine presence in paint — the characteristic warmth of flesh tone, the rich treatment of hair, the fashionable costume handled with fluid brushwork. Unlike his idealised anonymous bathers, Misia's likeness required individual specificity, and Renoir accommodates both physiognomic particularity and overall pictorial warmth.