뒤랑-뤼엘의 딸들

The girls in the garden are Marie-Thérèse and Jeanne, the daughters of Paul Durand-Ruel — the Paris dealer who, almost single-handedly, kept the Impressionists from going under. He bought their canvases by the dozen when the public wouldn't, and in doing so he mortgaged himself to the edge. Renoir painted this in 1882, the same year a Paris bank called the Union Générale collapsed and dragged Durand-Ruel's finances down with it. For a while it looked as though the man bankrolling the whole movement might be ruined, and the painters with him. None of that worry shows here. The brushwork is quick, but Renoir slowed for the small things: the laces of the boots, a black ribbon at the younger girl's throat, the flower tucked into a straw bonnet. Within a few years Durand-Ruel would ship crates of pictures like these to New York, and the American buyers he found there saved them all.