Thérèse Berard

In the summer of 1879 Renoir travelled to Wargemont, a country house near Dieppe on the Normandy coast, as the guest of Paul Berard, a banker and former diplomat who had started buying his work the year before. Berard turned into the steadiest patron Renoir ever had, and the visits went on for about a decade.

Therese was his niece, and Renoir painted her on that first stay along with the children of the house. Portraits like this were not made for a dealer's window. They went onto the walls at Wargemont, for the family that had asked for them. Five years later he painted the three Berard daughters together in the drawing room of the same house, a canvas that is now in Berlin. This one is small, 56 by 47 centimetres, and it hangs at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts.