Here Pierre-Auguste Renoir, the French Impressionist, paints a girl crocheting, treating the girl’s blonde hair with a great brightness just as he does the cascade of thread in her hands in an otherwise darkened room.
Painted in 1875, The girl is absorbed in her task which distances her from us but also she is close to the spectator in terms of her proximity to the plane or front of the picture, and so there is a tension between these two poles.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s A Girl Crocheting is in the Clark Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts.