Artwork · 19th century · Auguste Renoir

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Two Sisters (On the Terrace)

Auguste Renoir1881Oil on canvas100.4 × 80.9 cm

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At a glance

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A young woman in a red hat and a little girl in a flowered hat pose together on a riverside restaurant terrace, with the Seine glittering behind the railing.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted it in 1881, at forty, on the terrace of the Restaurant Fournaise in Chatou, just outside Paris.
Despite the title, the two models were not related. Smooth, careful faces meet a loose, shimmering riverbank in one picture.

Reading the picture

4 places to look closer

Tap a number on the painting to jump to its note, or a close-up to see that spot in the whole picture.

Zoom in on the woman in the red hat. Her cheeks and lips are softly pink and polished, almost like porcelain. Yet her eyes slide away from us, off to one side. The Art Institute of Chicago describes her as gazing absently past her young companion.
Now look at the little girl below. Her blue hat is piled with pink roses, white daisies and red blooms. Her round cheeks are flushed, as if she has just run into the picture, and her blue eyes look straight at you. The flowers are dabbed on thickly, but her face is so smooth you can barely find a brushstroke.
Zoom in on the basket at lower left. Bundles of red, green, deep blue and pink swirl together inside it. The museum identifies them as skeins of yarn whose colors echo the girl's flowered hat. Gathered like that, they even look a bit like a painter's palette.
Look past the railing behind the pair. Through the branches you can make out bright water and small reddish boats, all softly blurred. Here Renoir's brush moves fast, so water and leaves melt into each other. The people up close are crisp, and the river beyond is a dream.

When it was painted

In 1881 Renoir was forty. That spring he traveled to Algeria, and back home he kept returning to the Restaurant Fournaise in Chatou, a village on the Seine west of Paris. He saw the place as the perfect escape from city noise, a spot for nature and good company. Around this time he also painted his friends on the same terrace in Luncheon of the Boating Party.

Two Sisters is one of the last pictures he set at the Fournaise. This time he did not use friends. He paid two models who were not related at all. The older girl's blue flannel outfit was the kind women wore for boating in those years.

The picture was noticed quickly. That same year it was reproduced in the Paris fashion magazine L'art de la mode. In 1882 the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel showed it at the seventh Impressionist exhibition, and several newspaper reviewers mentioned it.

Then it crossed the ocean. In 1886 it was in the exhibition of Paris Impressionists that Durand-Ruel brought to New York. Decades later it belonged to the Chicago collector Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn, and her bequest brought it to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1933.

Look once more at the yarn in the basket. Renoir placed the colors of the girl's flowered hat right there, within reach of her hand, and they tie two strangers into one scene.

The painter

Auguste Renoir

1841–1919

When painting this, the artist was about 40 years old

All paintings by Auguste Renoir →

More by the same painter

Madame Georges Charpentier (Marguerite-Louise Lemonnier, 1848–1904) and Her Children, Georgette-Berthe (1872–1945) and Paul-Emile-Charles (1875–1895)1878

By the Seashore1883

Young Girl Bathing1892

Hidden stories in this painting

Why does the basket in the corner look so much like the little girl's hat?Two girls on a riverside terrace. In the lower left, a basket of yarn glows in the same colors as the flowered hat.

Questions to think about

Look for itWhich colors from the girl's flowered hat can you also find in the basket of yarn?
Why?Why do you think Renoir called two unrelated models sisters?
What about you?The loving families in photos and ads are often models, too. When I see a scene like that, what makes it feel real to me?

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