The painting I chose to critical analyze was Young Girl in a Straw Hat by Pierre-Auguste Renoir finished in 1884.

Renoirs goal in this photo is to show his love of the intrigue of being challenged and encouraged by a beautiful middle-class girl that he had passed at some point. He uses the hat and the hair of the young girl as characteristics to stand out and be remembered as

what the girl was. He uses the girls eyes, raised eyebrow, lips and hand to show the contemplation, excitement and challenge that this young girl is giving Renoir and the audience.

The background helps accentuate the girl more than detail the surroundings.

The

background is green on the upper half with red dots scattered throughout while the lower half is yellow. This separation indicates that the background is natural and that she is not posing for the painting, but rather that she is outside. The idea that she is outside fits in with the mode that she is of upper-middle class because she is not supposed to always be inside and she is not in a situation that would require her to wear fine clothes. The most important thing about the background though, is the grand brush strokes. These are important because they fade all of the background together making it overall rather blurry. Renoir does this to move the focus to the girl, making the background and surroundings very out-of-focus due to its lack of importance.

The defining characteristic about this girl that would stand out if one was to pass a hundred young girls on a street would be the straw hat and the red hair. Because of this the hat and the hair take up a large percentage of the middle of the picture. The hat is such a defining piece to her importance that Renoir defined her with it, naming the painting Young Girl in a Straw Hat. The straw hat is well key to the painting, located in the upper center of the picture. The white brim of the hat adds to its overall elegance compared to a simple straw hat. Her hair, which leads from the hat, flows down over her body and the painting, catching the audiences eye. Being bright orange-red, the fiery hair is another rather unforgettable trait of the young girl. Another purpose for the hair is to frame the face. The hat aids in bordering the top of the face, but the contrast between the pale face and the red hair does a good job to feature the face.

The dress is of little importance. Again it shows that she is of some wealth with the frills in the neck, but the bland light-blue color and medium-sized brush strokes for it show its lack of importance. The greatest importance of the dress is that the neckline provides the bottom in the framing of the face.

Her right hand is shown on the bottom left of the painting feeling through her hair. The hand is quite polished and smooth not appearing to be hardened by the abuse of a working life. Also, located on the hand is a simple ring. A wealthier, nobler young girl might have had more jewelry ornamenting her hand, but this young girl has a small ring on her right hand ring finger. This supports the idea that she is upper-middle class.

The young girls face is of extreme interest. Renoir clearly made this the focal point of the painting placing it in the slightly upper middle of the painting. Similar to the ring on the right hand, the earing that she is wearing shows that she can afford jewelry, but is not as ornate as an earing that one might wear from a higher class, establishing this young girl in the upper-middle class. Overall her face is rather pale except for the somewhat rosy cheeks indicating a life where she was not needed to do any hard labor. Her eyes

are in an overall very unimpressed gaze. The lips are perfectly sealed and there are shadows of the muscles below the lips in full effort showing the lips pursed. Finally, her right eyebrow is raised in an intrigued manner.

Getting deeper after defining all of the surface characteristics of this young girl, Renoir focuses on the feeling that she is experiencing. The four factors that the audience can notice here are her hand, her lips, her gaze and her eyebrow raise. Her hand is feeling through her hair, not clutching it in a sense to hold onto something as though all else is lost, but not playing with it like there is no care in the world either. This could show that she is contemplating a decision. The lips are pursed as if they are judging something, waiting to determine how they feel about the audience. The most important of the signs of the emotions of this young girl can be seen in the eyes. This stare that she gives is one of little emotion but more a look that she is unimpressed with the audience. That look paired with the eyebrow raise, indicating intrigue, means that although she might not be impressed with the audience, she is interested in what else there is to the audience, encouraging the audience to try harder.

The background is blurry and whatever it is has little importance to Renoir and the audience. The defining features that are the straw hat and the red hair were the summary of what the young girl is and potentially what Renoir remembered his muse had looked like. The look on the face and her mannerisms were what made him full of excitement. The pondering of her hand through her hair and the judgment in her lips show that she is thinking about the audience. Finally her eyes and raised eyebrow represent the challenge and encouragement that Renoir found so interesting in her.

Renoirs goal is to show the intrigue of a challenge in a new counterpart. The importance of her being upper middle-class is the appeal that she has to the middle class. She is attractive to an audience of both women and men, women who would like to be similarly strong and unimpressed and men who seek the challenge to impress.

Renoir does a good job showing this intrigue of a new relationship. His use to cloud the background really focuses the audience on the young girl and the framing of the hair, the hat and the dress do a great job to frame the face in the viewing middle of the painting. With the simple generic face, Renoir does a good job to draw focus to the eyes as the face, and to a lesser extent the hand because they are the only very detailed parts of this painting. I believe the muscles below the lip are too accentuated and might be doing a disservice to Renoirs goal, but the focus still remains on the eyes and the raised eyebrow.