According to Ambroise Vollard’s memoirs, in the spring of 1875 Renoir rented a second Parisian studio and garden, at 12 rue Cortot, after he had sold his Mother and Children (‘The Frick Collection, New York) for the princely sum of 1,200 francs. For the next eighteen months he divided his time between his home at 35 rue Saint-Georges and the upper story of this dilapidated seventeenth -century outbuilding on the Butte Montmartre, where he also had use of the stables to store his canvases and, even more important, free run of a large garden in which to paint in plein air. Having established residence in Montmartre, Renoir began work the following year on the masterpiece of his Impressionist period, the Moulin de la Galette (Musée d'Orsay, Paris), conceived between April and October 1876 in both the open-air dance hall and the garden of the rue Cortot.

Renoir’s model here, Nini Lopez, a young girl from Montmartre, appeared in at least fourteen of the artists canvases between 1874 and 1878, and it has recently been suggested that she posed for the large Mother and Children Riviere described her as an “ideal model: punctual, serious and discreet” and admired her “marvellous head of shining, golden blond hair”. Renoir would also remember her as beautiful and docile, but somewhat duplicitous3ƒ4he spoke of “a certain Belgian disingenuousness” in her. Although Nini’s mother entertained hopes that Renoir would eventually become her protector, these were finally disappointed when Nini married a third-rate actor from the Montmartre theatre.

It is clear, however, that costume is of little concern to Renoir here. His chief interest is to record the sunlight as it filters through bushes and trees onto the diminutive and fashionably dressed Parisienne. He had already investigated these effects on the nude; Nini in the Garden marks an early stage in such treatment of the dressed figure. Somewhat tentatively, Renoir painted the reflections of foliage on Nini’s face and the larger shadows on her dress. Her golden brown tresses are overwhelmed by the greens and browns of the background foliage; the forms of her dress dissolve in the dappled light and shadow.

Those elements of Renoir’s luminist vocabulary that would cause such outrage in 18773ƒ4his colored shadows, the violet tonality of his outdoor scenes3ƒ4are present in this early example: for example, the line of chartreuse that defines Nini’s cheek and chin as well as the mauve patches of shadow on her dress. Although his plein-air painting still owed much to Monet3ƒ4whose Camille Reading, 1872 had explored the dappled effect of sunlight on the dressed figure3ƒ4in the paintings he made in the garden of the rue Cortot, Renoir developed what Théodore Duret would consider his most striking contribution to Impressionism: depicting the human figure in the endlessly changing, mobile light of nature. Renoir’s exploration of light dancing over the human figure would achieve full expression in The Swing and Moulin de la Galette. In Nini in the Garden such effects are rendered a little hesitantly, but with the daring of experiment.

It is not only in matters of technique that Nini in the Garden is characteristic. Nini, in elegant tocque and fashionable dress, sits somewhat uncomfortably on the makeshift garden chair, her neat and relatively formal attire contrasting wittily with the overgrown and unkempt garden. She is transformed from professional model and working-class beauty into demure lady of the manor. And this transformation is made, typically, with both sympathy and tenderness and a complete lack of condescension. Julie Manet would recall Renoir saying how delicate he had found the people of Montmartre whom Zola had portrayed as bestial. Yet his depiction of Nini is equally misleading, replacing the customs of Montmartre with a sweeter respectability. This was Renoir’s great fiction3ƒ4as willful as Zola’s3ƒ4and it was at the core of his figure paintings of the 1870s, sustaining a vision of modernity that was highly colored and eternally joyous.