Girl in a Spanish Jacket

Girl in a Spanish Jacket (1900), at the Gothenburg Museum of Art, presents a female figure in the Spanish-influenced costume that appeared in French fashion of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Renoir had painted Spanish-influenced costume subjects before, drawing on the Orientalist tradition of dressing models in exotic or theatrical dress to expand the chromatic possibilities of portraiture. The black and red of a Spanish jacket provided sharp contrast against flesh tones and warm backgrounds, creating the kind of vivid colour opposition he enjoyed.

The Spanish jacket's strong blacks and potential red or coloured trim create sharper tonal contrast than Renoir typically sought in his all-warm palette, and he moderates this by keeping the black passages enlivened with reflected lights — purples, deep blues — that prevent them from becoming dead voids within the composition.