Madame Georges Charpentier et ses enfants

The little boy in the blue-trimmed dress at the centre is three-year-old Paul Charpentier, and in 1878 dressing small boys exactly like their sisters was simply what fashionable Paris did. His mother Marguerite ran one of the city's sharpest literary salons, where Flaubert and Zola were regulars, and she used every bit of that influence to get Renoir a prime spot at the Salon of 1879. It worked. This warm, expensive-looking room full of Japanese decor and a patient family dog was the picture that turned Renoir from a struggling Impressionist into a portraitist the wealthy wanted. Years later the young Marcel Proust saw it hanging in the same house and folded it into his novel, praising how Renoir had caught the poetry of an elegant home and the beautiful dresses of the time.