‘In Renoir’s figure painting, portraiture deserves a place unto itself,” Georges Riviere writes. “For no other artist has looked so deeply into his sitter’s soul, nor captured its essence with such economy.”

Fig. 1 Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Gabrielle et Jean, 1895-96, Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris

Executed in 1895, Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Jeune fille coiffée d'un fichu orange is a breathtaking example of the artist’s subject for which he was best known: female portraiture. "In Renoir’s figure painting, portraiture deserves a place unto itself,” Georges Riviere wrote in 1925, "for no other artist has looked so deeply into his sitter’s soul, nor captured its essence with such economy.” (quoted in Colin B. Bailey, ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Portrait Painter’ in Renoir’s Portraits, Impressions of an Age, New Haven and London 1997, p. 1). Though certainly celebrated for his formal commissions, Renoir delighted in the more informal portraits of his friends and family. In the same year as the present work, Renoir executed an important series of portraits of his young son, Jean, and Gabrielle, the family’s housekeeper (fig. 1).

Fig. 2 Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Étude de Femme, circa 1880, sold: Replica Shoes ’s, London, 3 February 2015, lot 3 for $915,141

As suggested by Francois Daulte, pastel was the preferred medium for these more intimate portraits. He writes, “If he frequently used that.mes dium to depict those near and dear to him, it was because pastel, which combines colour with line, gave him the possibility of working rapidly to capture in all their vividness the rapid flash of intelligence and the fleeting show of emotion" (quoted in Pierre-Auguste Renoir: Water-colours, pastels, and drawings in colour, London 1959, p. 10). Daulte defines 1886-1895 as a critical period for Renoir’s pastels, especially for those depicting young women.

Jeune fille coiffée d'un fichu orange evokes the gestural and rich qualities of an oil painting but also possesses the softness and airy traits of a work on paper. With pure, complementary colors and a striking gaze, Renoir brings life to his sitter's image. The detail of her dress and head scarf was typical of Renoir’s attentions to the female fashions of the t.mes , while the nuanced tints in the subject's flesh exhibit his mastery in depicting the female body. “I look at a nude; there are myriads of tiny tints,” he wrote of his practice. “I must find the ones that will make the flesh on my canvas live and quiver” (quoted in Exh. Cat, New York, Hammer Galleries, Renoir, 2010-2011, p. 64).

The work was a part of the prestigious Hahnloser collects ion, one of the most celebrated private collects ions of French modernist art. In addition to the work of their artist-friends, such as Bonnard, Hodler, Matisse, and Vallotton, Arthur Hahnloser and his wife Hedy Bühler were avid collects ors of Renoir, Cézanne, and Van Gogh. The Swiss collects ors' steady support of museums and the artists they patronized played a large role in the collects ion of European modernism in Switzerland.