Frau auf der Treppe

Around 1876 the publisher Georges Charpentier, who printed Zola and Flaubert, asked Renoir for a pair of tall narrow panels for his house in Paris, one with a man on a staircase and one with a woman. Renoir was 35 and selling almost nothing. The Charpentier household did more for him than the Impressionist exhibitions did. In 1878 he painted Madame Charpentier with her children, the Salon hung it well the following year, and buyers started paying attention. This panel went afterwards to the Berlin collector Otto Gerstenberg. It was moved to the Soviet Union in 1945, and it sat in the Hermitage stores unexhibited and unlisted for 50 years, until 1995, when the museum finally put that group of paintings on public view.