Woman in Black

Woman in Black (Portrait de femme en noir) is a small oil on canvas portrait painted by Pierre-Auguste Renoir in Paris around 1876 and signed 'A. Renoir'; it belongs to the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg.

The sitter's identity is uncertain, and several names have been suggested. One theory sees her as Madame Hartmann, wife of a music publisher; another as Anna, a young model from Montmartre whom Renoir is thought to have painted also in the Nude now in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow; a third names Henriette Hauser, the model for Manet's Nana. Renoir shows her half-length, leaning on her left arm and looking out at the viewer. Her hair is pinned up with a dark ornament, and she wears earrings, a touch of rouge and a black dress relieved only by a white collar, a dark blue ribbon at the neck and lace at the wrists. The colours of her skin and of the ribbon are picked up in the blue-patterned wall behind her.

Russian Wikipedia treats the work as a typical image of the Renoir woman and points to its handling of the black dress, an effect he developed further in The Umbrellas. The Hermitage curator Albert Kostenevich wrote that, whoever the sitter was, the canvas is less a character study than a celebration of the beauty of black: pure black appears only in the shadows, and the rest of the dress is built from fine gradations of grey, from near-black to silver.

The Moscow merchant Sergei Shchukin bought the painting in the early 1900s. His collection was nationalised in 1918, and the portrait passed to the State Museum of New Western Art in Moscow; when that museum was dissolved in 1948 it was transferred to the Hermitage. Since late 2014 it has hung in the Shchukin and Morozov memorial galleries in the General Staff Building. It measures about 65 × 55 cm.