Portrait of a Woman
Renoir, Pierre-Auguste.
Pastel on laid paper pasted on cardboard. 65x48.8 cm
France. 1877
Source of Entry: formerly in the collection of Otto Krebs, Holzdorf.
Transferred from Germany after World War II

It is not known who posed for this picture, but clearly it was a commissioned portrait: the woman's face, her posture, the decorative details of the background all suggest as much. Moreover, the painting was executed in a manner likely to impress the person who commissioned it, and it is even possible that she prompted the choice of medium - Renoir employed pastel relatively rarely. But even if he took the model's wishes into consideration, he never changed his style. The effortless arabesques in the background of the picture, reaching near abstraction, remind us that for him, it was the purely pictorial problems that remained fundamental in works of any type.