La Mère et les enfants

In the spring of 1876 Renoir hung this canvas as the centrepiece of what he brought to the second Impressionist exhibition, and he called it La Promenade. It shows a young woman leading two small girls, dressed as identical little sisters, along a tidy path in a Paris park. Everyone is turned out in the height of fashion, the eldest in a blue velvet jacket trimmed with red fox, the children in miniature jackets edged with soft white fur. Renoir wanted to prove that the loose, bright Impressionist touch could carry a large, ambitious figure painting, not just a quick landscape. The critics mostly walked past it, and the few who wrote it up were unkind. It is nearly life-size, close to five and a half feet tall, which is easy to forget from a reproduction. The girls' pale fur and the woman's dark coat still hold the cold light of an early spring afternoon.