Study for “Young Girls Playing Volant”

This small, unfinished oil sketch illustrates Pierre-Auguste Renoir's informal studies of friends when they visited his studio and garden. These sketches were exercises in painting spontaneously before the subject. Through rapidly applied strokes of bright color, Renoir captured the features of his subject enjoying an ordinary, everyday moment-one of the hallmarks of Impressionism. Renoir frequently united studies of multiple heads on a single canvas. Here, he included a second portrait sketch at top right.

Gift of Henry W. and Marion H. Bloch