In the Meadow

In September 1892 the French State bought a Renoir for the first time, paying 4,000 francs for a picture of two girls at a piano. The poet Stéphane Mallarmé and a young official in the fine-arts administration had spent months pushing for it, and the canvas went to the Musée du Luxembourg. Renoir was 51. The same pair of models turn up all through those years, the blonde in a white frock and the dark-haired one in pink, and they are the two girls at that piano. Here they are picking flowers under slender trees whose leaves close over the top of the canvas like a bower, one trunk wrapped in ivy. The Met dates the painting somewhere between 1888 and 1892, in the soft, feathery handling Renoir took up after several years of hard dry outlines. Two wide-brimmed hats lie in the grass at the lower right, set down while the picking goes on.