Girl at the Foot of a Tree (Fillette au pied d'un arbre)

Girl at the Foot of a Tree (Fillette au pied d'un arbre), 1914, combines Renoir's two primary late subjects—the young female figure and the southern French landscape—within the intimate compositional frame he favoured in his final years. Placing a child against a tree trunk was a traditional compositional device grounding the figure within the natural world, and in the Provençal context it connected to his feeling that the human figure and natural landscape belonged in organic unity. This is among the works created in the difficult period when he could barely hold a brush.

The tree trunk provides a vertical compositional anchor for the small figure. Renoir models the child with his characteristic warm flesh tones while the tree bark is painted with more textured, rougher strokes. The surrounding landscape dissolves into freely applied green and ochre passages.