Two Sisters (On the Terrace)

Painted in 1881 at the riverside restaurant of La Maison Fournaise on the Seine, Two Sisters shows a young woman in a vivid blue dress seated beside a smaller girl, a workbasket of wool between them, with the green river shimmering in the sunlit background. Pierre-Auguste Renoir was at the height of his most jubilant period, fresh from the success of the Luncheon of the Boating Party painted at the same spot, and the canvas radiates the sheer pleasure he took in youth, summer and the small ceremony of companionship. The girls were not in fact sisters — the model was a seamstress, the child an acquaintance — but the title fixed the mood of easy kinship the picture so effortlessly conveys. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.