Young Woman Arranging Her Earring (1905): Art, History and Details

Young Woman Arranging Her Earring (1905) 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 his later years, Pierre-Auguste Renoir moved away from pure Impressionism toward a classicizing style featuring strong, monumental figures of substantial weight and volume. This depiction of a woman arranging her earrings, a superb example of that trend in the artist's late work, may have been inspired by one of the figures in Eugène Delacroix’s Women of Algiers in their Apartment (Musée du Louvre, Paris).

Object facts

• Title: Young Woman Arranging Her Earring
• Date: 1905
• Creator attribution: Pierre-Auguste Renoir (French, 1841–1919)
• Culture: France, 20th century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on fabric
• Dimensions: Framed: 76.5 x 67.5 x 10 cm (30 1/8 x 26 9/16 x 3 15/16 in.); Unframed: 55.3 x 46.4 cm (21 3/4 x 18 1/4 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1951.324

A detail from the museum

The model for this painting is Gabrielle Renard—a housekeeper, nursemaid, studio assistant, and frequent model to Renoir.

Collection credit

Bequest of William G. Mather

Further reading listed by the museum

• “Lists of Objects in the Exhibition.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 16, no. 9 (1929): 159–75.
• Cleveland Museum of Art, “Recent Acquisitions Press Release,” September 26, 1951, Cleveland Museum of Art Archives.
• Milliken, William, and Henry Francis. "Bequest of William G. Mather." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 38, no. 8 (October 1951): 196-198

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.