Girls at the Piano

By 1892 Renoir's friends were embarrassed that the French State, which was slowly warming to the Impressionists, had never bought a single work from him. The poet Mallarme and a young arts official helped arrange an informal commission, and this is the picture Renoir made for it, bound for a national museum. Maybe that is why he could not leave it alone. He painted the same scene, two girls at a piano, one seated and playing and the other leaning in over the music, some five or six times over, in oils and pastel, reworking a composition he usually would have finished once. The softness is deliberate, the warm domestic hush of a bourgeois afternoon, the flowers and curtain dissolving around the two heads. It was the first Renoir the French government ever owned, bought in September 1892 for 4,000 francs.