Woman at the Piano

Renoir showed this at the second Impressionist exhibition, held in a Paris gallery in April 1876. The group had put on their first show only the year before and been mocked for it, and this time the critics who came largely walked past this canvas without a word, singling out other pictures instead. It is a quiet domestic scene: a young woman in a pale gown at an upright piano, sheet music before her, everything softened by warm indoor light. Renoir cared less about the exact drawing of the room than about how the light fell across her dress and the polished wood. Music at the piano like this was an ordinary evening pastime in the middle-class Paris homes he came from and painted.