Portrait de Mme Henriot

Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted Henriette Henriot — the Comédie-Française actress — on multiple occasions in the mid-1870s, this 1876 version at the Museum collection Am Römerholz in Winterthur being one of the most important. Henriot embodied for Renoir a type of Parisian femininity — the actress and performer who inhabited the public space of bourgeois pleasure — that recurs throughout his work of this decade. The multiple portraits of the same sitter across a few years suggest both genuine friendship and a painter exploring a model's range across different moods and settings. The Römerholz collection in Winterthur, Switzerland is one of the most distinguished private collections of Impressionist painting in Europe, giving this work a prestigious context.

Renoir's mid-1870s portrait technique combines the loose, varied brushwork of Impressionist plein-air work with focused attention to the face and expression. The surface is animated with his characteristic flickering touch — light playing across the face, hair, and clothing in broken strokes of varied color. The background is kept impressionistic to emphasize the figure.