Two Young Girls at the Piano

Two Young Girls at the Piano was painted in 1892 as part of an informal commission from the French state — the first official recognition of Renoir's work by the government after nearly two decades as a central figure in Impressionism. The commission was facilitated by the poet Stéphane Mallarmé and Roger Marx, a young administrator at the Beaux-Arts who sought to remedy the state's longstanding failure to acquire work from one of the most significant painters of the age. Aware of the scrutiny to which the submission would be subjected, Renoir developed the composition through a series of five canvases; the state acquired one version for 4,000 francs in September 1892 and placed it in the Musée du Luxembourg, the Paris museum devoted to work by living artists, from which it passed to the Musée d'Orsay when that museum opened in 1986. Other finished versions are held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (Robert Lehman Collection) and in two private collections; an oil sketch is at the Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris. Renoir was born in Limoges on 25 February 1841 and trained in Paris, first as a porcelain painter and then at the École des Beaux-Arts, where he studied under Charles Gleyre alongside Monet, Sisley, and Bazille. After a sustained Impressionist career through the 1870s he underwent a period of doubt about the movement in the mid-1880s and moved toward a warmer, more classical manner; the Piano paintings belong to this later phase. He died at his villa Les Collettes in Cagnes-sur-Mer on 3 December 1919.