Madre e figli

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.