Woman in Tulle Blouse and Black Skirt (Femme en blouse de tulle et en jupe noire dans un paysage)

Woman in Tulle Blouse and Black Skirt, 1917, belongs to Renoir's final period of costumed figure paintings at Cagnes, when he continued to dress models in varied clothing as inspiration for the interplay of fabric textures with human form. The combination of translucent tulle and solid black skirt presented a technical challenge—the see-through quality of the blouse against the opaque skirt—that he met with the same exploratory enthusiasm he had brought to figure painting across six decades. This Barnes Foundation canvas from his penultimate year of active painting shows undiminished technical curiosity.

The translucent tulle blouse required Renoir to paint the fabric as a semi-transparent layer through which the underlying form is visible—a challenge he meets through thin, light strokes of cream and white over the flesh-toned passages beneath. The contrast with the solid black skirt creates a dramatic tonal structure.