Renoir’s preferred subjects were adolescent girls, whom he idealized as perfectly epitomizing female beauty. He wrote, “In literature as in painting, talent is shown only through treatment of the female figurine.”

Here. “The Sculptor in His Studio.” Behind his head a woman wiggles in front of a window above a city, her hands covering up or playing at the place between her legs. Maybe both. The sculptor looks out from the canvas with black hole eyes, holding a tiny replica of the woman in his hands. His tiny, tiny woman. He made this tiny tiny, this subtle symmetry. He made such perfect beauty from whatever he had to work with.

She wasn’t much, but she gave him that.