Head of Young Girl (Tête de jeune fille)

Head of Young Girl (Tête de jeune fille), undated, at the Barnes Foundation, belongs to the large category of Renoir head studies in the collection—bust-length or partial-figure portraits of young women without specific identity, painted as exercises in flesh-tone modelling, hair colour, and expression. Barnes collected these intensively as pure demonstrations of his figure-painting intelligence, arguing that such studies showed more clearly than finished compositions what made Renoir's approach to the human figure unique. The head study format allowed Renoir to work rapidly and spontaneously without the elaborate compositional preparation required for larger works.

The head study concentrates all painterly attention on the face—warm, blended flesh tones building skin luminosity, hair rendered with fluid directional strokes, eyes and mouth noted with minimum descriptive marks. The background is treated as pure colour atmosphere rather than defined space.