Girl in a Lace Hat

The girl wears a white lace hat and has a gaze as if looking into the distance. The lace of the hat conveys a sheer lightness through fine movements of the brush. The volume of the puffed sleeve is also differentiated by the way the strokes are layered.

Her face and skin have a faint flush, and the background is softly blurred in gentle colors. The white of the hat floats brightly against it and enhances the freshness of the girl's expression. Rendering form through shifts of color rather than clear outlines is also typical of Pierre-Auguste Renoir in this period.

Renoir, who grew up with a tailor father and a seamstress mother, excelled at painting the texture of clothing. It seems he sometimes provided his models with hats and costumes he had chosen himself. In this work of 1891 too, the hat gives the female figure a lively charm.

The Pola Museum of Art, which holds it, centers on the collection that Suzuki Tsuneshi, the second-generation head of the family that founded Pola, gathered over some forty years after the war. This work could be called the face of that collection.