The Small Theater Box

A box at a Paris theatre in the 1870s was somewhere to be looked at as much as to look from, and the audience spent a good part of the evening studying each other. In April 1874 Renoir put a large canvas of exactly that scene into the first Impressionist group exhibition, staged in the photographer Nadar's old studio on the boulevard des Capucines. His brother Edmond and a model called Nini Lopez sat for the couple in the box, arranged in the studio rather than at any real theatre. He worked the subject over repeatedly in those months, and this is one of the small canvases that came out of it, about 27 by 21 centimetres. It hangs in a villa in Baden in Switzerland, where Sidney and Jenny Brown started buying Impressionists in Paris in 1908 and ended up with 22 Renoirs.