Woman Playing the Guitar
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1897
For now, just to look at
The photograph we have of this work is not sharp enough to print at the quality we want, so we are not selling it for now. We are looking for a better one.
About the work
- Artist
- Pierre-Auguste Renoir
- Date
- 1897
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 81 x 65 cm
- Collection
- Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon
- Reference
- XDV-3616
What the museum label doesn't tell you
Look at the color before the scene: the armchair is the exact red of the guitar, as if Renoir had melted furniture and instrument into one warm mass from which she rises, white, almost weightless. She is not playing for us, she is not even looking our way, lost in her own fingers on the neck. Dressed as a "Spanish" woman in muslin and pink bows no one in Seville ever wore, she is wrapped in pure theatrical fantasy. Painted in 1897, now in Lyon, its classicism owes more to Corot, Titian and Rubens than to any real guitar. Costume or homage?
