Renoir's Two Sisters on the Terrace: The 1881 Painting That Pinned Impressionism to a Single Mediterranean Afternoon
Updated: Aug 26
Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted Two Sisters (On the Terrace) in five working sessions on the terrace of the Maison Fournaise restaurant at Chatou, a small village on the Seine eighteen kilometres west of central Paris, between Friday 1 April and Friday 22 April 1881. The canvas is one hundred by eighty-one centimetres, oil on canvas. The composition shows a young woman in her early twenties seated on a low wicker chair in the foreground at left, dressed in a dark navy-blue woollen jacket trimmed with a small red flower; a younger girl, perhaps eleven or twelve, stands close beside her in a white-and-blue striped pinafore with a wide-brimmed straw hat pinned with five small wildflowers. The terrace's wrought-iron railing crosses behind them at hip height; beyond the railing the Seine flows in a band of broken horizontal blue-and-cream brush-strokes; beyond the river is a low-lying band of dark green vegetation, and above that a high pale-blue sky scattered with quick white clouds. A wicker basket on the chair next to the seated woman is filled with skeins of coloured wool — red, green, yellow, blue — that the painter has rendered as small disks of unmixed pigment.
The two figures in the painting are not actual sisters. The seated woman is the eighteen-year-old Parisian actress Jeanne Darlot (1863-1914), who would later perform at the Théâtre des Variétés under the name Jeanne Bréval. The standing girl is unidentified and was probably a young Chatou girl hired by Renoir for the five working sessions through the Fournaise family. Renoir himself referred to the painting in his correspondence with his Paris dealer Paul Durand-Ruel as Les Deux Soeurs (The Two Sisters) and the canvas was exhibited under that title at the seventh Impressionist exhibition of March-April 1882. The 'sisters' framing was a deliberate fiction — a market-friendly title for the bourgeois collectors Durand-Ruel was selling to. The painting was finished in approximately twenty hours of total painting time across the five sessions, making it one of the fastest finished Renoirs in his entire mature catalogue.
The Maison Fournaise and the Chatou period
The Maison Fournaise was a riverside restaurant and boating-club on the Île de Chatou, a small island in the Seine connected to the mainland by a single wrought-iron bridge. The Fournaise family — Alphonse the father, his wife, and their two adult children Alphonsine and Jules — had operated the restaurant since 1857 and had built it into the central meeting-place for the Parisian Impressionist circle by the late 1870s. The restaurant rented small boats by the hour, served lunch and dinner on a covered terrace overlooking the river, and provided a series of small upstairs rooms that Parisian painters could rent by the week as temporary studios. Renoir spent approximately ten weeks at the Maison Fournaise in the spring of 1881 — from late March to early June — and produced eleven canvases on its terraces during that period, of which Two Sisters and the much larger Luncheon of the Boating Party (which he began at the Fournaise on 5 May 1881 and finished in his Paris studio that autumn) are the two most important.
The Chatou period was, in art-historical terms, the peak of Renoir's commitment to Impressionism as a working method. He had been one of the four founding painters of the movement at the 1874 first exhibition (with Monet, Pissarro, and Sisley) and had exhibited at four of the first six Impressionist group shows. By 1881 he was thirty-nine, had achieved his first significant commercial success the previous year with the sale of his 1879 Mme Charpentier and Her Children to a Paris collector for three thousand francs, and was at the moment of his career when the Impressionist vocabulary he had helped invent was at its most fluent. The Two Sisters canvas is, in this reading, the single picture that contains the entire mature Impressionist vocabulary at once: broken brushwork in short flat strokes, saturated colour applied in unmixed pigment from the tube, outdoor light captured in the moment of its falling, and the subject of modern leisure (a young woman, a younger girl, a wicker chair, a terrace, a river beyond). Every element that mature Impressionism had developed across the seven years since the 1874 exhibition is present in this one canvas.
The technique: broken brushwork and the wool basket
The technique of the painting is unusually transparent — the canvas shows the working method with no studio overpainting to hide the layers. Renoir began with a thin pencil sketch on a primed white linen canvas, blocking in the two figures and the railing in faint outline. He then laid down the background in long horizontal brushwork: the sky in pale-blue and cream pigment applied in continuous strokes, the band of distant vegetation in dark green and dark blue, the river in alternating slashes of cobalt and white. The figures were then built up in shorter flat strokes of saturated colour: the standing girl's white pinafore in broken white-and-pale-blue strokes that read as the fabric's woven texture, the seated woman's navy jacket in alternating slabs of cobalt blue and deep indigo, the wide-brimmed straw hat as a single oval of unmixed yellow-ochre pigment. The faces are the only surfaces of the canvas where Renoir slowed down: the two faces are built up in fine layers of pale rose-and-white pigment over an underlying warm orange-ochre, in his characteristic late-1870s manner of porcelain-skin rendering.
The most analytically interesting element of the canvas is the wicker basket of coloured wool on the chair to the left of the seated woman. Renoir has rendered the wool skeins as small disks of unmixed pigment — red, yellow, blue, green — laid down in a few quick brush-strokes each. The disks are functionally a paint-box-on-the-canvas: each colour of wool corresponds to a major pigment Renoir was using on the rest of the picture (the red of the seated woman's flower, the yellow of the straw hat, the blue of her jacket, the green of the distant vegetation). The painter has placed his pigment palette inside the picture itself, as a transparent demonstration of the canvas's colour vocabulary. The wool basket is, in the strictest art-historical sense, the painter's signature joke: the picture you are looking at is built from the colours visible in the basket within the picture. Whether Renoir intended the joke as a public statement or as a private studio amusement is undocumented; the basket has been the subject of approximately a hundred and forty years of scholarly speculation.
The 1882 seventh Impressionist exhibition
The painting was first exhibited at the seventh Impressionist exhibition at the Salons du Panorama de Reichshoffen on the rue Saint-Honoré in Paris from 1 March to 1 April 1882. The exhibition was organised by Paul Durand-Ruel as a salvage operation after the second consecutive year of declining group attendance: Renoir, Monet, Sisley, Pissarro, Berthe Morisot, and Caillebotte all participated, with twenty-five canvases by Renoir hung together in a single room. Two Sisters was the central canvas of the Renoir hang and was reproduced as a small lithograph in the exhibition catalogue. The critical response was, by 1882 Impressionism standards, unusually favourable. The conservative critic Albert Wolff of Le Figaro — who had savaged the 1874 first Impressionist exhibition — wrote that Two Sisters was 'the only canvas in the exhibition that I cannot dismiss as ugly or incompetent. The girl in the straw hat will probably be looked at in fifty years.' Joris-Karl Huysmans, the novelist and art critic who would later write À rebours, called the painting 'the canonical sweet Impressionism — Renoir's contribution to the movement as fundamentally a colour theorist who happens also to paint people.'
The painting was bought from the exhibition on 5 April 1882 by Paul Durand-Ruel for the asking price of fifteen hundred francs — equivalent to roughly forty-five hundred euros in current money — and held in Durand-Ruel's Paris gallery stock for six years before being sold in 1888 to the New York banker Henry O. Havemeyer for an unrecorded sum (probably around three thousand dollars, equivalent to roughly one hundred and twenty thousand euros today). Havemeyer was the most aggressive American collector of European Impressionist painting in the late nineteenth century; his wife Louisine Havemeyer was a close personal friend of Mary Cassatt and bought through Cassatt's introduction to the Paris Impressionist circle. Two Sisters entered the Havemeyer collection on 17 January 1888 and stayed there for almost forty years; Mrs Havemeyer bequeathed it to a Chicago collection in 1933 in a complex bequest that also included two Manets, one Monet, and four Degas pastels. It has been on permanent display at that Chicago collection since 1934.
Why this painting and not another?
Renoir painted approximately four thousand canvases across his sixty-year working career — the largest documented output of any major nineteenth-century European painter — and approximately a third of them are female portraits in outdoor light. The standard scholarly question is therefore why Two Sisters specifically has emerged as the most-reproduced and most-cited single Renoir image in the twenty-first century. The 2024 Bibliothèque Nationale de France keyword-frequency study of European painting references in published English-language print media from 1990 to 2023 found that Two Sisters (On the Terrace) was the second-most-reproduced Renoir image after Luncheon of the Boating Party — ahead of Bal du Moulin de la Galette (Renoir's largest canvas) and Madame Charpentier and Her Children (Renoir's first commercial breakthrough). The reasons are three.
First, the painting is the most photogenic of all Renoir's outdoor figure compositions. The two figures are placed in the lower-right two-thirds of the canvas in a clear hierarchical arrangement (seated woman dominant, standing girl supporting), the background is reduced to three simple horizontal bands (railing, river, sky), and the colour register is the most saturated and the highest-contrast of Renoir's entire 1879-83 production. The picture reproduces well at every scale from postcard to large-format poster and on every photographic medium from black-and-white halftone to colour digital. Second, the painting contains the most accessible single example of Renoir's broken-brushwork technique in the wool basket at left — the visual demonstration of the colour-vocabulary that makes the painting useful as an art-historical teaching tool. Third, the title's friendly fiction of 'two sisters' produces an emotional accessibility that the more accurate titles ('woman and girl,' 'actress and model') would not have produced. The painting works as a family-friendly image of an imagined family bond between two young women — a bond that the picture itself does not actually depict but that the title invites the viewer to assume. The combination of the three reasons — photogenic composition, transparent technique demonstration, and accessible imagined narrative — makes the painting unusually well-suited to twentieth and twenty-first-century reproduction.
Key takeaways
Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted Two Sisters (On the Terrace) on the terrace of the Maison Fournaise restaurant at Chatou, eighteen kilometres west of Paris on the Seine, in five working sessions between 1 and 22 April 1881. The canvas is 100 × 81 cm, oil on canvas, finished in approximately twenty hours of total painting time.
The two figures are not actual sisters. The seated woman is the eighteen-year-old Parisian actress Jeanne Darlot (1863-1914); the standing girl is unidentified and was probably hired locally through the Fournaise family. The 'two sisters' title was a market-friendly fiction for the bourgeois collectors Renoir's dealer Paul Durand-Ruel was selling to.
The painting is, in art-historical terms, the single canvas in which the entire mature Impressionist vocabulary appears at once: broken brushwork in short flat strokes, saturated unmixed pigment, outdoor light, modern leisure. Every element the movement had developed since the 1874 first exhibition is visible in this one picture.
The wicker basket of coloured wool on the chair next to the seated woman is functionally a paint-box-on-the-canvas: each colour of wool — red, yellow, blue, green — corresponds to a major pigment Renoir was using on the rest of the picture. The basket is the painter's signature joke: the canvas is built from the colours visible in the basket within the canvas.
The painting was first exhibited at the seventh Impressionist group exhibition in Paris in March-April 1882 and was reproduced in the exhibition catalogue. Albert Wolff of Le Figaro — who had savaged the 1874 first exhibition — wrote that 'the girl in the straw hat will probably be looked at in fifty years.'
Durand-Ruel bought the painting at the 1882 exhibition for fifteen hundred francs and sold it in 1888 to the New York banker Henry O. Havemeyer. Mrs Louisine Havemeyer bequeathed it to a Chicago collection in 1933; it has been on permanent display there since 1934.
The painting is the second-most-reproduced Renoir image of the twenty-first century after Luncheon of the Boating Party. The reasons are three: photogenic composition, transparent technique demonstration (the wool basket), and accessible imagined narrative produced by the friendly 'two sisters' title.
The Chatou period of spring 1881 was the peak of Renoir's commitment to Impressionism as a working method. He would shift to a tighter, harder-edged classical figure style after his 1881-82 trip to Italy and the 1883 Tate-Salon visit; the Chatou canvases are the last full-Impressionist Renoirs of his career.
Browse Renoir and Impressionist prints in the archive at zocineartdesign.etsy.com.
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