Portrait of Pierre Sisley

On 24 March 1875 Renoir organised an auction at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris for himself, Monet, Berthe Morisot and Alfred Sisley. 73 pictures went up, a crowd came in to jeer, the police had to be called, and the takings barely covered the costs of the sale. Sisley had put in 21 canvases and was the poorest of the four. Some time that year Renoir painted his friend's son Pierre, then about eight, on a canvas smaller than a sheet of writing paper. The portrait stayed in the household. Sisley kept it until he died in 1899, his daughter Jeanne had it after that, and the public first saw it in 1907, in a Paris exhibition of what had been left in Sisley's studio.