Girls Picking Flowers in a Meadow

In the summer of 1890 Renoir stayed with the Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot and her husband Eugène Manet, Édouard Manet's brother, at the country house they had taken at Mézy on the Seine. He asked their daughter Julie, then 11, to pose for him with her fair-haired cousin Jeanne Gobillard. He set them in a meadow in elaborately ruffled, ribboned bonnets, and the Museum of Fine Arts sees them as shepherdesses out of a rococo pastoral, the make-believe countryside François Boucher painted for French aristocrats in the 18th century. The slim tree in flower at the left, the museum suggests, can also be read as a hint of growing up. Renoir sold the canvas to Durand-Ruel in February 1892. In May 1900 the two cousins married on the same day, in a double wedding, Julie to the painter Ernest Rouart and Jeanne to the poet Paul Valéry.