Gli amanti

Renoir painted this around 1875, in the busy early years of Impressionism, and he did what he often did then, which was to pose his own friends. The couple leaning together under the trees are a young actress he liked to use as a model and a painter from his circle. She has slipped off her hat, a small sign of an easy, unguarded afternoon, and the whole scene is built out of dappled light falling through the leaves, the effect Renoir loved above all others. It is a large canvas for such an intimate subject. It reached Prague in 1923, part of a single bold purchase of French modern art that still forms the core of the national collection there.