The English Pear Tree

Renoir painted this orchard around 1873, the year before he and his friends mounted the show that earned them the name Impressionists. He was 32 and selling very little. Nothing happens in the picture. There is a pear tree, a footpath, and a man, a woman and a small girl somewhere in the grass, and that is the whole subject. The canvas then spent well over a century out of public sight. It belonged to the collector Gustave Cahen until 1929, passed through the hands of the Paris dealer Paul Rosenberg in the years after that, and reached the Musee d'Orsay only in 2012, when it was handed to the French state in settlement of inheritance tax.