Young girls at the piano

In 1892 Claude Monet was in Rouen, painting the front of the cathedral again and again as the light shifted. That same year his old friend Renoir kept returning to a scene of his own, two girls bent over a piano, and made at least six versions of it. The Musée de l'Orangerie, which owns this one, suggests he may have had a series in mind in the same spirit. The finished version bought by the French state hangs just across the Seine at the Musée d'Orsay, with a curtain and a vase of flowers behind the girls. Here most of that furniture is gone, and the wall dissolves into loose strokes of green, blue and gold. The piano itself was probably close at hand. Renoir had married Aline Charigot in 1890, and according to the museum he bought her a piano as a wedding present. This canvas later belonged to the dealer Paul Guillaume, and it entered the national collections in 1959 with the collection of his widow, Domenica Walter.