Woman and Child in the Grass (Femme avec enfant sur l'herbe)

Woman and Child in the Grass, 1898, belongs to Renoir's sustained outdoor figure production during the decade when he was spending significant time at Essoyes in Burgundy, his wife Aline's home village, where the combination of gentle rolling landscape, vegetable gardens, and rural domestic life provided a different register of subject matter from the Parisian café and theatre scenes of his earlier career. The mother-and-child subject was commercially successful and personally significant for Renoir, who had become a father relatively late in life and brought genuine affection to these maternal subjects — unlike Degas, who approached the female figure with a more analytical and sometimes discomfiting detachment. His contemporary Mary Cassatt was exploring similar mother-and-child subjects in France at precisely this period, developing a distinctly feminist perspective on the theme that contrasts interestingly with Renoir's more sentimentally warm approach. The Barnes Foundation's acquisition of multiple such works reflected Albert Barnes's conviction that Renoir's tenderness was as artistically significant as his colour intelligence.

The composition balances the two figures within a freely indicated garden setting, with Renoir's characteristic feathery brushwork building grass and foliage through varied short strokes of green, yellow-green, and blue. The figures are painted with somewhat more deliberate blending, their warm tones set off against the cool outdoor light.