Cavaliers au bois de Boulogne

The Bois de Boulogne, on the western edge of Paris, had been laid out as a public park in the 1850s, and by the 1870s it was where fashionable Paris went to be seen. Renoir set his largest canvas yet there in 1873, an elegant woman on horseback with a boy riding beside her, exactly the leisured display the new bourgeoisie enjoyed. The rider is usually identified as Henriette Darras, an army officer's wife. The official Salon turned the picture down that year, and it went instead to the Salon des Refusés, the counter-show for rejected work, where it found a buyer. Renoir painted the two figures from separate sittings and joined them in the finished scene.