Christine Lerolle Embroidering

In February 1897 the French state put Impressionist paintings on public view for the first time. Gustave Caillebotte had died in 1894 and left his collection to the nation. Renoir, his executor, spent three years negotiating against officials and against professors of the École des Beaux-Arts who threatened to resign, and the settlement was 40 pictures, squeezed into a new annexe of the Musée du Luxembourg. Renoir was painting this in those same years, in a household where that argument simply did not arise. Henry Lerolle, a Salon painter who collected, had been buying Degas and Renoir for years and kept an open house for musicians and painters on avenue Duquesne. Behind his daughter Christine and her bamboo embroidery frame, two men in dark jackets are studying the pictures on the wall, a Degas and a Renoir among them. For his work on the bequest Renoir took his fee from Caillebotte's brother in the form of a Degas.