Girl with a Basket of Oranges

This companion piece to the girl with the fish basket presents a young working figure — a girl carrying oranges — in a sympathetic, intimate mode that softens any trace of social critique. Painted in 1875 and also in the National Gallery of Art, the vivid orange of the fruit gives this canvas unusual colour intensity for a figure study. The subject may relate to the informal street vendors common in Paris, or to a posed model in a semi-theatrical context. The pairing of the two basket girls suggests Renoir was thinking about them as complementary works, contrasting in the colour temperature of the objects carried.

The oranges provide a chromatic focal point of warm yellow-orange against the more muted tones of the girl's clothing. Renoir renders the fruit as approximate spheres of colour rather than precisely defined forms, allowing warmth to radiate outward.