Young Woman in a Flowered Hat

Renoir's portraits of women in flowered hats occupy a sub-genre within his figure painting that became commercially reliable and personally significant — he found in the combination of a young woman's face and a decorated hat an ideal vehicle for his painterly values of warmth, colour, and organic decoration. Young Woman in a Flowered Hat dates from the period after his so-called Dry Period crisis of 1883–87, when he had abandoned temporarily the loose brushwork of his Impressionist decade for harder edges and more precise drawing. Returning to this kind of summery portrait in the late 1880s or '90s, he brought a richer, more deliberate colour sense to what had once been instinctive.

The flowers on the hat are treated with the same impastoed attention as cut flowers in a vase, each bloom sketched with quick rotational marks in pink, white, and yellow. The face is modelled in warm flesh tones with soft shadow areas in rose-grey. Background is kept deliberately vague, a warm neutral haze that isolates the figure.