Portrait de Mademoiselle Yvonne Lerolle

In the mid-1890s the Paris home of the painter Henry Lerolle was one of the places where art and music kept company. Degas and Renoir came by, and so did the young composers Chausson and Debussy, who in 1894 dedicated a set of piano Images to Lerolle's daughter Yvonne. That is the girl Renoir paints here, around the same year, seated and composed, in the soft pearly manner he had settled into after a harder, more classical phase. Renoir knew the family well and painted the Lerolle daughters more than once. A few years later he would show Yvonne again at the piano, beside her sister Christine. Both girls would marry into the Rouart family, sons of the collector Henri Rouart, tying two art-loving households together.