Young Spanish Woman with a Guitar

Spanish subjects had been one of the organizing threads of French Romantic and Realist painting since Delacroix's Moroccan journey of 1832, and Manet's engagement with Spanish painting in the 1860s — his copies after Velázquez, his paintings of Spanish dancers and guitarists — gave the tradition renewed currency for the Impressionists. Renoir's 1898 Young Spanish Woman with a Guitar at the National Gallery of Art enters this tradition late but with its own character. By 1898 the Spanish subject was no longer novel — its exotic charge had been domesticated through a half-century of repetition — but the guitar-playing woman gave Renoir a natural, informal figure in decorative costume that suited his late manner's preference for warm, saturated colour over social commentary. The guitar-playing subject also had its own tradition within French painting, connected to the eighteenth-century imagery of music-making women derived from Dutch and Flemish models. Renoir's version is neither picturesque exoticism nor social observation but a pretext for the warm colour harmonies of his late 1890s manner: the red and black of a Spanish jacket against warm flesh tones and a loosely painted background, the guitar providing the diagonal compositional accent he needed to animate the figure's pose.

Renoir uses warm, saturated colour — the Spanish costume's reds and blacks set against a loosely painted warm background. The guitar provides a strong diagonal accent. The woman's hands on the instrument are rendered with careful attention to their position on the strings. Overall technique is loose and fluid, characteristic of his late 1890s style.