It's all wrong, a pink cream cheese flowery whip of a painting, a lovely woman painted in a lovely way with loving attention, in colors all too pretty in a room papered in pink swirls, the painting of a besotted man squirming in reverie under her bemused return of his gaze- it is grounded in her, in Miss Samary's force, alive in the air itself: an aura radiates around her and interplays with the softness and her own self-possession.
She is as breathing in this moment as any moving image; more so. She is staring with the lightest but most relentless clarity; time swirls within the painting- 150 years are a wisp, a spring breeze on the arm, a swallow of champagne.
Fall in love the damn world or we'll never save it.
La Reverie. Renoir- Portrait of the Actress Jeanne Sammary.1877.