Portrait of Captain Édouard Bernier

In the early spring of 1871, France had just signed an armistice with Prussia, and Paris was weeks away from the uprising of the Commune. Renoir, who had served that winter in a light cavalry regiment, spent those weeks in the south-west with his former commanding officer, Captain Édouard Bernier, at the estate of Madame Bernier's parents in Tarbes, at the foot of the Pyrenees. Long afterwards he told Julie Manet, the daughter of the painter Berthe Morisot, that he had spent two months in a château, treated like a prince, riding every day and teaching the couple's daughter to paint. While he was there, the captain sat for him in dress uniform, his decorations pinned to the braided jacket, and his wife posed for a matching portrait. Both pictures later belonged to Joseph Stransky, a conductor of the New York Philharmonic. Her portrait is now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and his ended up in Dresden.