Portrait of Misia Sert (Jeune femme au griffon)

Portrait of Misia Sert (Jeune femme au griffon), 1907, depicts Misia Godebska-Sert, one of the great artistic muses of the Belle Époque era, who had been a friend of Toulouse-Lautrec, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Bonnard, and later Diaghilev. Renoir painted her with her pet griffon dog, a composition that connects to eighteenth-century French portrait conventions of aristocratic women with lapdogs. Misia was pianist and patron rather than painter, but her presence at the intersection of the Parisian artistic world made a Renoir portrait of her socially significant. The Barnes Foundation canvas is among the more formally composed of his late portraits.

The figure-with-dog composition creates an intimate, domestic scale. Renoir models Misia's face with warm, blended flesh tones and paints the griffon with freely applied short strokes suggesting its wiry coat. The background is loosely indicated, ensuring the figure and animal read as a unified compositional group.