CHILD WITH A WHIP

This image of a child has come to epitomise the art of Renoir, full of warmth and charm, reflecting the mood of his many portraits of women. The subject is five-year-old Etienne Goujon, dressed somewhat effeminately as was usual for little boys in the 1880s. Produced at a time when the artist was looking closely at the art of Ingres and of Raphael, seeking to revive a certain purity of drawing, this painting contains a contrast between the precise lines of the child's face and the freely applied brushstrokes of the Impressionist landscape. This style became known as Renoir's "hard" or "Ingres" style and it reflected the crisis in Impressionism, a crisis experienced by all the artists in the group. By the 1990s, the artist was to reject the use of hard lines and his painting was to become increasingly free and gentle.