Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s mature work is largely characterised by paintings of female figures engaged in quiet activities set within lush landscapes. Executed using rich, sensual brushstrokes and painted at a time in which the artist was experiencing great commercial success, he was awarded the Légion d'Honneur in 1900, Jeune femme assise is a remarkable example of the painterly invetsigations Renoir was committed to at the turn of the century.

At the beginning of the 1880s Renoir travelled widely to North Africa and the Mediterranean coast before exploring museums across Madrid, Amsterdam, Dresden and London. It was whilst travelling and immersing himself within these varying visual cultures that Renoir began to apply strokes of paint with increasing fluidity and deepened his dialogue with artistic traditions from the past. The influence of Titian and Peter Paul Rubens became more evident in his compositions and in the textural application of paint and depth of palette in the present work Renoir demonstrates an extension of the ideas articulated in the work of the Renaissance and Baroque masters. Commenting on this thematic continuance Renoir wrote to his dealer René Gimpel: "I'm trying to fuse the landscape with my figures [...]. The old masters never attempted this" (Renoir quoted in, John House, Renoir (exhibition catalogue), Hayward Gallery, London, 1985, p. 278).

Jeune femme assise avec chapeau reflects the artist’s achievement both as a painter of the human form and of landscapes. The stylistic developments that culminated in works including the present, have been analysed by art critic Clement Greenberg who wrote: "In the last decades of his life Renoir won through to a new handling of the three-dimensional form. He achieved this in two ways: by throwing the entire emphasis of his color on warmth—his adherence to the bas-relief organization of the picture, in which solid forms were lined up on a single frontal, therefore advancing, plane (as in Titian), permitted him to do this with plausibility—and by modeling throughout with white highlights and correspondingly light and translucent coppery reds and silvery grays. It is above all to this high-keyed, aerated modeling that Renoir owes the triumph of his later nudes, portraits, and figure compositions. Paradoxically, it was by dint of becoming more sculptural, after having at last tried his hand at actual sculpture, that he joined the Venetians and Rubens on the heights of painterly painting" (C. Greenberg, Art and Cultural Critical Essays, Boston, 1961, pp. 47-48).

In the present picture Renoir employs a careful chromatic arrangement of warm tones set against verdant greens. Delicate accents of white, reflective of those mentioned by Greenberg, create the impression of light playing across the canvas. With its meditative and hedonistic atmosphere, indicative of Impressionism, Jeune femme assise avec chapeau is testament to Renoir’s endless re-envisioning of traditional painterly subject matters and a romantic idyll from one of the great masters of Impressionism.