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Auguste Renoir - Georgette Charpentier seated 1876

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From Bridgestone Museum of Art, Tokyo:
A girl wearing a blue dress and matching socks is seated on a large chair. The blue that dominates this painting is used in the shading around the girl’s eyes, her hair, and the carpet on the floor. Her pose, with her legs crossed, suggests a rather precocious little girl; Renoir used the same pose in a painting of a nude late in his career. The model for this work, which was shown in the third Impressionist exhibition, in 1877, was the eldest daughter, then four years old, of Renoir’s patron, the publisher Georges Charpentier. Charpentier, who had achieved a great success through publishing the novels of Zola and Maupassant, hosted a salon for artists and politicians in his home. Renoir, like Pissarro and Monet, painted landscapes en plein air, but his range of interests also included paintings of the human figure and genre scenes.