Julie Manet with Cat by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (Interpretation and Analysis)
Julie Manet with Cat Source: Musée d'Orsay In keeping with my continuous efforts to celebrate cats in art, today I am going to be chatting about a rather adorable painting: Portrait of Julie Manet with Cat . The painting depicts Julie Manet—the niece of the famed French painter Édouard Manet and the daughter of the great impressionist painter Berthe Morisot—at age nine. Morisot and her husband Eugène Manet commissioned their good friend Pierre-Auguste Renoir, one of the greatest and most famous painters of the impressionist movement, to paint their daughter Julie. Here, Renoir depicts Julie in a white dress with a smiling cat on her lap. According to the Musée d'Orsay, the painting is a good example of Renoir's "Ingresque" period (that is, similar to the art of the French Neoclassical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres). Julie’s smooth, placid expression and round face invites the comparison to Ingres’ doll-like portraits of women. Renoir’s painting of Juli...