Renoir - Girl with Cat

Girl with Cat was painted in 1880.

Type of the painting - Oil on canvas.

Painting size - 120 x 94 cm.

In the Girl with her Cat, a portrait of Julie Manet, only the face is still treated in the Ingresque manner. The rest of the picture is wonderfully free and full-bodied, while the linework is anything but cold or cramped. Even so, the model, though only a child at the time, was much intrigued by the way Renoir went about his work, and she has related how he first thinned his colors, laid them on the canvas patch by patch, and after each sitting stowed the canvas away in a damp corner of the cellar to keep the colors from drying. Now these methods were still those of his Harsh Period, for later on he customarily began by covering the entire canvas with a light scumble. As for the Blond Bather, though the face tends to be stylized much as that of Julie Manet, the rest of the picture is handled even more freely; the whole lower half, in fact, is only broadly sketched in.

It is a part of the following sets: Girls, Portrait