The best biography of Renoir is still the book Renoir el ses amís (1921), by G. Rivieré, in 1845 Renoir moved with his family (a family of very humble condition) to live in Paris, and had, in his adolescence, to earn a living on dark tasks (painting porcelain, fans, etc.), before being able to attend to their training. He felt, at first, the influence of the landscaper Daubigny and that of Courbet; then, in 1868, painting with Monet outdoors, in Bougival, the lively theme of the Grenouillére (the small fluvial island where bathers and canotiers met), attracted by the shifting effects of sunlight on people and waters of the Seine, instinctively applied, with his friend, the basic technique of impressionism, which in his hands reached a velvety and warm softness that was private. In it he made some of his most important paintings: The dance of the "Moulin de la Galette", The swing, etc .; later, around 1884, he would abandon the Impressionist mode of painting for the cultivation of a more linear style (The Umbrellas, of the National Gallery of London). To that phase would happen another important one in its race: the stage "anacarada".

When he painted this beautiful portrait (1878), Renoir had not yet abandoned the technique of Impressionism, of which he had been, with Monet, the initiator. In the group of the Impressionists, his paintings, sensual and cordially human, stood out with their own values through the predilection of their author for the popular or the intimate, or for the magnificent female nudes that he always cultivated, especially in the lit ones meats that were painted in his last years, when, because of the deforming rheumatism, to use the brushes they had to tie them to his ankylosed fingers.