
 A Girl with a Watering Can painted by Artist Auguste Renoir, displays a mature impressionist style with specific requirements of figure painting. As said “Renoir’s colors reflect the freshness and radiance” of the impressionist style. There has not yet been any identification of the girl, but it is believed that Renoir used a model of a neighborhood child whose features pleased him. Also many of the features of the girl is repeated throughout Renoir’s work, suggesting she was a favorite figure of the artist to recreate. I believe artist Renoir was trying to evoke a sense of purity and innocence painting a girl, you can see it through his use of vivid colors, the balance of the image created by positioning the child and the objects, and his sole focus on the little girl.

Artist Renoir paints with similar colors but different hues to envelop the child in a warm bright scene to showcase the child’s innocence. The colors surrounding the little girl are blues and greens to create the atmosphere of a garden, with hints of pink, red, and yellow as the flowers. The girl is painted with a velvet blue dress with white lace decorations and a red bow on top. The red bow draws the eyes to the top to focus on the girls’ facial features, emphasizing the rosy cheeks and her pale complexion, an epitome of purity. Her golden hair and blue eyes would add on to her angelic features as well. The blue dress also draws attention to the emerald green watering can and her small dainty hands holding a few daisies. The little girl on an outing to water the flowers and pick some too. 

The positioning of objects helps create the balance and the focal point of the image, to assert the child’s appearance. The child and the watering can in the center of the image creates a stability to gather the attention on the girl. It’s balanced with a bush at the front of the image in the bottom corner, and the edge of a garden in the background. Texture also helps balance out the image, the texture is very uniform throughout the image. Each area has its own texture that the artist paid a lot of delicate detail to the grass in the background, the yellow gravel pathway, the plants, and the girls dress and hair. The texture also blends in at the hair and the grass behind it, the only distinction is the color to separate them. Color balances out the image too, just like the light color of the hair is adjacent to the dark green patch above the red bow. 

The focal point presented in the picture is the child holding onto the watering can. One could assume that this could be the fact that she is about to water some plants and that she is also in a garden. The painter also decided to draw the focal point right in the middle of the picture. This allows the observer to focus mainly on the middle of the picture. The child in the picture is also wearing a very dark blue dress which does resemble the clothes and style that people would wear back in England. She also is wearing a pair of matching boots along with that. From what the child in the picture is wearing, one can interpret that the painter must have been recreating an image from the 1900s where this sort of style and clothing was present. 

Another aspect that can be interpreted from the image is how the image was painted. In the image, the lines are not drawn in a straight row from the left to the right or up to down. Instead, it seems that the image itself was blotted on by paint brushes instead of using stencils or any sort pencil. The picture itself does look blotchy at first, however; it allows the observer to really admire and appreciate the detail and formation of the picture itself. 

One theme that might apply to the image could be love and happiness. In the image, the child is smiling while holding a watering can. The smile attributes to happiness and love for it could be that she has a love for gardening. Also, the vibrant colors in the picture also exhibit a very enlightening and positive atmosphere due to the nature of the colors itself. The reason why love and happiness is so strongly articulated with this image is that it is not the vibrant colors or whether or not the child is smiling in the picture, it is the fact that the painter decided to paint a child in the first place. A child resembles happiness, love, innocence, and a need to nurture. This can be seen in the way that the child is nurturing for the plants with the water can.

Assembling all of the key facts in this picture one can conclude to a point that the painter was trying to bring about a sense of innocence, peacefulness, and happiness within the picture. The painter used bright colors to instill the atmosphere of happiness and used the child in the photo to resemble the themes of innocence and purity. This can be observed by how the child in the photo has angelic hair and blue eyes. The way the image was painted allowed for the increase of detail on the focal point of the image which was the child. By blotching out the background scenery, the child in the photo is clearly the main focus of the image. It is also the clothes that which she is wearing that allows for the observers to get a sense of where and when this image was painted. Artist Auguste Renoir painted a magnificent image that focuses not only on the girl itself in the photo but brings about a sense of innocence, happiness, and purity through the vibrant selection of colors that he used, the painting techniques, and also the style of clothing that he decided the child wore. 
