Das Wirtshaus der Mutter Anthony

Renoir was 25 when he painted this, years before anyone spoke of Impressionism. The setting is a real place, an inn run by a Madame Antony in the village of Marlotte, on the edge of the Fontainebleau forest south of Paris, where young painters lodged cheaply and argued over art. Renoir gathered his friends around the table, among them the painter Alfred Sisley, and down on the floor put a white poodle named Toto, who had lost a leg and wore a wooden one. The newspaper on the table and the sketches chalked on the wall behind fix the moment. It is one of his first large, ambitious canvases, made while he was still finding his way out of the studio and into scenes drawn from ordinary life.