''Young Girls at the Piano'' (French: Jeunes filles au piano) is an oil-on-canvas painting by French artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir, a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style. The painting was completed in 1892 as an informal commission for the

Musée du Luxembourg The Musée du Luxembourg () is a museum at 19 rue de Vaugirard in the 6th arrondissement of Paris. Established in 1750, it was initially an art museum located in the east wing of the Luxembourg Palace (the matching west wing housed the Marie de' ...

. Renoir painted three other variations of this composition in oil and two sketches, one in oil and one in pastel. Known by the artist as repetitions, they were executed to fulfill commissions from dealers and collectors. The work is on public display at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris,

Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...

in New York, and the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris.

Description

Renoir depicts two young girls at a piano in a bourgeois home, one in a white dress with blue sash seated playing and one in a pink dress standing. Renoir completed three additional versions of this composition in oil for collectors; the Luxembourg version is now housed at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, the Robert Lehman Collection version is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, while the Caillebotte version and one other are in private collections. An oil sketch of the composition is on display at the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris and a pastel sketch is in a private collection. The painting in the Musée d'Orsay is 116 cm high and 90 cm wide. The version at the Met is 111.8 x 86.4 cm. The oil sketch at the Musée de l'Orangerie is 116.0 x 81.0 cm.

Pissarro Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro ( , ; 10 July 1830 – 13 November 1903) was a Danish-French Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painter born on the island of St Thomas (now in the US Virgin Islands, but then in the Danish West Indies). H ...

and

Monet Oscar-Claude Monet (, , ; 14 November 1840 – 5 December 1926) was a French painter and founder of impressionist painting who is seen as a key precursor to modernism, especially in his attempts to paint nature as he perceived it. During ...

routinely painted series of variations on a single theme, but their works were intended to be shown together to chronicle the effects of light and atmosphere, while Renoir’s repetitions were independent essays in

composition Composition or Compositions may refer to: Arts and literature *Composition (dance), practice and teaching of choreography *Composition (language), in literature and rhetoric, producing a work in spoken tradition and written discourse, to include v ...

. In particular, details and poses changed subtly, and the sketches eliminate most of the background elements. Renoir explored a similar composition with his earlier 1888 work '' The Daughters of Catulle Mendès'', now in the Annenberg Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.The Daughters of Catulle Mendès at the Met
/ref>

References

External links

''Young Girls at the Piano'', 1892, Auguste Renoir
Google Art Project, www.googleartproject.com 1892 paintings Paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir Paintings in the collection of the Musée d'Orsay Musical instruments in art {{DEFAULTSORT:Young_Girls_at_the_Piano