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Two Sisters (On the Terrace)

Artist: Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919)
Date: 1881
Dimensions: 100.5 x 81 cm
Medium: Oil on canvas
Location: Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, United States

Two Sisters shows a young woman and a little girl seated on a terrace at Chatou, on the Seine west of Paris. Behind them, beyond a balustrade, lie flowering shrubs, the river and the sunlit far bank.

A closer look

The older girl wears a bright red hat and a dark blue flannel dress, a costume of the boating crowd; the little one has a hat crowned with flowers. A basket of wool rests on the younger girl’s lap. Renoir painted the figures with firm contours and creamy skin, but the background dissolves into feathery strokes of green, blue and white, as if seen through summer haze. The contrast between the solid figures and the shimmering landscape gives the painting its freshness.

History of the painting

Renoir showed Two Sisters at the seventh Impressionist exhibition in 1882, and it was bought by his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, whose family kept it for decades. It was later acquired by the Chicago collectors Annie Swan Coburn and her husband Lewis Larned Coburn, and after her death it came to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1933 as part of the Coburn Memorial Collection, together with many other Impressionist works.

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