Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Ambroise Vollard, Paris (probably)
Private Collection, Stockholm (acquired circa 1950)
Thence by descent to the present owner

Ambroise Vollard, Pierre-Auguste Renoir: Paintings, Pastels and Drawings, San Francisco, 1989, no. 1476, illustrated p. 304
Guy-Patrice & Michel Dauberville, Renoir, Catalogue raisonné des tableaux, pastels, dessins et aquarelles, Paris, 2009, vol. II, no. 1317, illustrated p. 392

'Here [...] is an utterly new vision, a quite unexpected interpretation of reality to solicit our imagination. Nothing is fresher, more alive and pulsating with blood and sexuality, than these bodies and faces as he portrays them. Where have they come from, those light and vibrating tones that caress arms, necks, and shoulders, and give a sensation of soft flesh and porousness? The backgrounds are suffusions of air and light, they are vague because they must not distract us' (Emile Verhaeren, quoted in G. Muesham, ed., French Painters and Paintings from the Fourteenth Century to Post-Impressionism: A Library of Art Criticism, New York, 1970, pp. 511-12).