Dancing Girl with Tambourine

Dancing Girl with Tambourine was produced as the pendant to Dancing Girl with Castanets in 1909, intended as a matched pair of decorative overdoor panels. Together they represent some of the last major figure compositions Renoir completed before arthritis effectively immobilised his hands. The tambourine connects this figure to a popular image in French art of the female dancer or musician — a figure combining feminine grace with a suggestion of Southern European or Romani vitality. Renoir, who had always admired Rubens's exuberant figures, brings to these late dancers a fullness and physical mass that connects them to his own late sculptural work.

The dancer raises the tambourine above her head, creating a strong upward gesture that animates the composition. Her flesh — arms, neck, and face — is rendered with the thick, warm impasto characteristic of Renoir's final decade, the strokes more sculptural than painterly in effect. Costume is handled in warm red-oranges, her hair loose around her shoulders.