The Piano Lesson

Renoir painted this in 1889, coming out of a hard stretch. A few years earlier he had decided he had wrung Impressionism dry, and after seeing Raphael's frescoes in Rome in 1881 he tried a harder, drier way of drawing that pleased almost no one, himself included. By the end of the decade he had softened again, back toward warm colour and rounded, comfortable figures. The subject here is domestic and quiet: a girl at the keyboard reading the music, an older woman leaning in to point at the page. The oranges and pinks of the wall and floor carry more of the feeling than the faces do. Three years later he would take up the same two-girls-at-a-piano idea again, and that version was bought by the French state.