The Day Dream (La Rêverie)

La Rêverie depicts Jeanne Samary, a celebrated actress at the Comédie-Française who sat for Renoir more than a dozen times during the late 1870s and became one of his most important models. The painting was shown at the third Impressionist exhibition in 1877 and again at the Paris Salon of 1879. It was acquired in 1902 by the Moscow collector Mikhail Morozov — brother of the better-known Ivan Morozov — and was nationalized along with the rest of the Morozov family holdings after the October Revolution of 1917. The collection formed the basis of the Soviet State Museum of Modern Western Art, opened in 1928, which Stalin ordered closed in 1948. Its contents were divided between the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts and the Hermitage, where this painting has remained in Moscow ever since.