A Box at the Theater (At the Concert)

The Paris theatre was a place to look and to be looked at, and the box, the loge, put you on display as much as the stage did. Renoir came back to this subject again and again. Here two young women share a box, one leaning on the red velvet rail with a fan and flowers, the other seated behind her. He seems to have started it as a portrait of particular people, then painted over their identities, so we no longer know who they are. When it was shown in 1882, critics noticed something new, the forms firmer and more clearly drawn than in his airy earlier work. Renoir was in fact beginning to pull back from soft Impressionism toward a tighter, more old-master way of painting that would occupy him for years.