Provenance
Dr. Gandie, Nice.[1] Private collection of Bernheim-Jeune, Paris, by 1913;[2] in partnership 1934 to (Durand-Ruel, New York); sold 1937 to (Carroll Carstairs Gallery, New York); sold 1937 to Andrew Mellon [1855-1937], Pittsburgh and Washington;[3] by inheritance to his daughter, Ailsa Mellon Bruce [1901-1969], New York;[4] bequest 1970 to NGA.
[1] Guy-Patrice and Michel Dauberville, _Renoir: Catalogue raisonné des tableaux, pastels, dessins et aquarelles 1858-1881_, Paris, 2007: 1:no. 403, include collector Henri Canonne (1867-1961) in the provenance. However, there is no other evidence of his ownership. Arsène Alexander, in _La Collection Canonne_ (1930) does not mention this picture, but includes a similar painting of a woman braiding her hair.
[2] The painting was exhibited at Bernheim-June in 1913 as lent by a private collection; was published in 1919 as in the private collection of Bernheim-Jeune; was was lent by Bernheim-Jeune to a 1933 exhibition in Paris.
[3] Information about Bernheim-Jeune and Durand Ruel, as well as Carstairs, is in a letter dated 28 November 1977 from François Daulte; in NGA curatorial files.
[4] Ailsa Mellon Bruce notebook now in NGA archives, copy NGA curatorial files.
Accession Number
1970.17.63
Medium
oil on canvas
Dimensions
overall: 55.5 x 46 cm (21 7/8 x 18 1/8 in.) | framed: 76.8 x 68 x 7 cm (30 1/4 x 26 3/4 x 2 3/4 in.)
Classification
Painting
Credit Line
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection
Tags
Painting Impressionist & Modern (1851–1900) Oil Painting Canvas French
Background & Context
Background Story
Young Woman Braiding Her Hair, painted in 1876, is one of Renoir most intimate figure studies and a painting that demonstrates his unmatched ability to render the beauty of the female form. The painting depicts a young woman, seen from behind, raising her arms to braid her long hair, her back and shoulders rendered in warm, luminous flesh tones that are the hallmark of Renoir mature style.
The painting belongs to the period of Renoir closest engagement with Impressionism, when his palette was at its brightest and his brushwork at its most free. The young woman, painted in a private, unguarded moment, is neither a model posing nor an ideal constructed by the artist but a real person, captured in an act of personal care that Renoir renders with tenderness and respect.
The painting most Renoir-like quality is its treatment of flesh. Renoir painted skin as no other painter has: warm, responsive, and alive, each touch of color suggesting the blood beneath the surface and the light that plays across it. The woman back, rendered in a series of warm and cool modulations that model the form without fixing it, is one of Renoir greatest achievements in the painting of the human body.
The painting exemplifies the quality that distinguishes Renoir from every other Impressionist: his devotion to the human figure as the primary vehicle of artistic beauty. Where Monet painted light and Pissarro painted structure, Renoir painted flesh - and his Young Woman Braiding Her Hair is one of the most beautiful demonstrations that flesh, properly seen and properly painted, is as worthy of artistic celebration as any landscape.
Cultural Impact
Renoir figure paintings of women established the most sensuous tradition in Impressionist art and influenced every subsequent painter who sought to render the beauty of the human body in paint. His treatment of female flesh as a subject of the highest artistic ambition, combining tenderness and formal rigor, created a model for figure painting that remains influential.
Why It Matters
Young Woman Braiding Her Hair captures Renoir at his most intimate and most skillful: a painter alone with his model, rendering the beauty of a private moment with a technique so warm and so immediate that the viewer feels they are in the room. The woman braiding her hair is both a specific person and an embodiment of the Renoir ideal: beauty as a natural fact, visible to anyone who takes the trouble to look.
