Porträt zweier kleiner Mädchen

By 1890 Renoir had left the fleeting light of his Impressionist years behind and settled into a warmer, more deliberate way of painting, much of it built around children. Two girls together was one of his favourite arrangements in this decade, and he came back to it again and again, the same young models shown reading a letter, gathering flowers, or seated at the piano. Here one girl leans in profile with her chin lifted while the other, in a hat, turns almost to face us. The pair reappear in his Girls at the Piano, painted around the same time and kept, like this canvas, at the Orangerie in Paris. Renoir was in his late forties, his hands not yet stiffened by the arthritis that would later change the way he worked.