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Two Sisters (On the Terrace)

Impressionist painting of two girls on balcony, bright flower hat, knitting basket.
CC0 Public Domain Designation

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  • Impressionist painting of two girls on balcony, bright flower hat, knitting basket.

Date:

1881

Artist:

Pierre-Auguste Renoir
French, 1841-1919

About this artwork

“He loves everything that is joyous, brilliant, and consoling in life,” an anonymous interviewer once wrote about Pierre-Auguste Renoir. This may explain why Two Sisters (On the Terrace) is one of the most popular paintings in the Art Institute. Here Renoir depicted the radiance of lovely young women on a warm and beautiful day. The older girl, wearing the female boater’s blue flannel, is posed in the center of the evocative landscape backdrop of Chatou, a suburban town where the artist spent much of the spring of 1881. She gazes absently beyond her younger companion, who seems, in a charming visual conceit, to have just dashed into the picture. Technically, the painting is a tour de force: Renoir juxtaposed solid, almost life-size figures against a landscape that—like a stage set—seems a realm of pure vision and fantasy. The sewing basket in the left foreground evokes a palette, holding the bright, pure pigments that the artist mixed, diluted, and altered to create the rest of the painting. Although the girls were not actually sisters, Renoir’s dealer showed the work with this title, along with Acrobats at the Cirque Fernando and others, at the seventh Impressionist exhibition, in 1882.

Status

On View, Gallery 201

Department

Painting and Sculpture of Europe

Artist

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Title

Two Sisters (On the Terrace)

Place

France (Artist's nationality:)

Date  Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.

1881

Medium

Oil on canvas

Inscriptions

Inscribed at lower right: Renoir '81

Dimensions

100.4 × 80.9 cm (39 1/2 × 31 7/8 in.)

Credit Line

Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial Collection

Reference Number

1933.455

IIIF Manifest  The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) represents a set of open standards that enables rich access to digital media from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions around the world.

Learn more.

https://api.artic.edu/api/v1/artworks/14655/manifest.json

Extended information about this artwork

Object information is a work in progress and may be updated as new research findings emerge. To help improve this record, please email . Information about image downloads and licensing is available here.

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