Young Girls at the Piano

In 1892 the French state did something it had never done before. It commissioned a picture from an Impressionist, Renoir, for the Musée du Luxembourg, the Paris museum devoted to living artists. Renoir knew every eye would be on that submission, so he worked this scene of two girls at a keyboard through a whole series of canvases, five or six in all, refining the pose and the colour before he settled the official version that now hangs in the Musée d'Orsay. The Hermitage owns one of those repetitions, and it is the least resolved of the group. The faces and the pale dress are barely carried past a sketch. Renoir signed it anyway, which for him meant he considered it finished. It later sat in the German collection of Otto Krebs before it reached Saint Petersburg.