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Two young girls at the piano
Pierre-Auguste Renoir • Painting, 1892, 116×90 cm
Description of the artwork «Two young girls at the piano»
The most fearless and far-sighted French art dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, opened an exhibition in 1892. It was Renoir’s sole exhibition. 10 years earlier, Durand-Ruel purchased paintings from the Impressionists so that they would not die of hunger, and the idea of such an event looked daring even for him. Now he had to collect the exposition, begging for the Renoir’s most significant paintings from the new owners.
111 artworks were collected in the gallery and presented to the admiring Parisians.
Over the past 20 years, they had learned to see differently: the sun glare on the skin of the Nude did not seem like cadaveric spots to them anymore, voluminous, passionate strokes did not look like daubs. At this exhibition, an important event for the 50-year-old Renoir took place: for the first time, Department of Fine Arts bought his painting for the Musée du Luxembourg. Once he sold his paintings for 50 francs, now Renoir got 4 thousand! The painting was Two Young Girls at the Piano. It had an enchanting celebrity fate: the Louvre, the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume and, finally, the Musée d’Orsay.
While the French were getting used to Impressionism, each Impressionist was already thinking about what to accustom the French to further, invented new techniques and mixed new colours on the palette. After travelling to Italy, after meeting with Raphael and Ingres and Ingres, Renoir cleaned all this bright emerald and transparent pink off his palette, carefully squeezed ochre and cobalt paints out of their tubes and began to outline the figures with an insistent outline. He was convinced that Impressionism underestimated the importance of classical drawing. Very soon, Renoir’s palette seemed dull to him, and he brought red, white, black and all the other colours back.
Renoir painted the Two Young Girls at the Piano picture during his enthusiastic period, when he left the classicist crisis and found his own pictorial language. Art critics call it “pearl” period for the special, no longer impressionistic and not entirely Ingres, iridescence of colours. The shadows on the dresses, and the hair of the two girls, and the curtain in the background, and the light reflections on the piano create an integral iridescent, small universe glowing from within, full of mutual reflexes, where everything is connected with everything and nothing is impossible without each other. Nothing can be added to this artistic world, and nothing can be taken out. It is perfectly balanced.
See also the study for the Two Young Girls at the Piano.
Written by Anna Sidelnikova
111 artworks were collected in the gallery and presented to the admiring Parisians.
Over the past 20 years, they had learned to see differently: the sun glare on the skin of the Nude did not seem like cadaveric spots to them anymore, voluminous, passionate strokes did not look like daubs. At this exhibition, an important event for the 50-year-old Renoir took place: for the first time, Department of Fine Arts bought his painting for the Musée du Luxembourg. Once he sold his paintings for 50 francs, now Renoir got 4 thousand! The painting was Two Young Girls at the Piano. It had an enchanting celebrity fate: the Louvre, the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume and, finally, the Musée d’Orsay.
While the French were getting used to Impressionism, each Impressionist was already thinking about what to accustom the French to further, invented new techniques and mixed new colours on the palette. After travelling to Italy, after meeting with Raphael and Ingres and Ingres, Renoir cleaned all this bright emerald and transparent pink off his palette, carefully squeezed ochre and cobalt paints out of their tubes and began to outline the figures with an insistent outline. He was convinced that Impressionism underestimated the importance of classical drawing. Very soon, Renoir’s palette seemed dull to him, and he brought red, white, black and all the other colours back.
Renoir painted the Two Young Girls at the Piano picture during his enthusiastic period, when he left the classicist crisis and found his own pictorial language. Art critics call it “pearl” period for the special, no longer impressionistic and not entirely Ingres, iridescence of colours. The shadows on the dresses, and the hair of the two girls, and the curtain in the background, and the light reflections on the piano create an integral iridescent, small universe glowing from within, full of mutual reflexes, where everything is connected with everything and nothing is impossible without each other. Nothing can be added to this artistic world, and nothing can be taken out. It is perfectly balanced.
See also the study for the Two Young Girls at the Piano.
Written by Anna Sidelnikova
