Peasant Girl with Dog (c. 1894): Art, History and Details

Peasant Girl with Dog (c. 1894) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Pierre-Auguste Renoir (French, 1841–1919).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

During the last decades of his career, Renoir worked prolifically in red chalk, which was used to develop a loose and sketchy style. In this drawing, the artist attempted to recapture the spontaneity that characterized Impressionist art a few decades earlier. By showing a young girl seated resting peacefully alongside a bale of hay, he idealized rural French life.

Object facts

• Title: Peasant Girl with Dog
• Date: c. 1894
• Creator attribution: Pierre-Auguste Renoir (French, 1841–1919)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: red chalk
• Dimensions: Sheet: 31 x 24.1 cm (12 3/16 x 9 1/2 in.)
• Collection: DR - French
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1949.551

A detail from the museum

The art historian John Rewald supposedly called this work "one of the two or three most beautiful Renoir drawings in America."

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Vollard, Ambroise. La vie et l’oeuvre de Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Paris: Vollard, 1919.
• Meier-Graefe, Julius. Auguste Renoir. Munich: R. Piper & Co., 1920.
• Meier-Graefe, Julius. Renoir. Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1929.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.