Portrait of Madame Henriot, the Actress

Pierre-Auguste Renoir's 1877 portrait of Henriette Henriot, an actress at the Comédie-Française, belongs to his sustained engagement with the performers and theater world of Paris in the 1870s. Henriot was not yet a major star — she would achieve greater fame in the 1880s — but she appeared in Renoir's work repeatedly, becoming one of his characteristic subjects alongside the bourgeois women of Montmartre. Renoir's interest in actresses and performers reflected both his social world and his painterly interest in self-conscious self-presentation — women who were accustomed to being looked at, whose public persona was itself a kind of artwork. The Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art in Oklahoma holds this as a significant example of Renoir's portrait practice.

Renoir's portrait handling in the mid-1870s combines direct, confident brushwork with his characteristic attention to the effect of light on skin and hair. The actress's face is likely rendered with the warm, luminous quality he brought to all his female subjects — light flickering across features, the background kept loose to concentrate attention on the face.