“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.
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Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted this delightful homage to springtime, youth, and beauty on the terrace of the Fournaise family’s restaurant on the Seine River at Chatou—where, six years before, he had made “Lunch at the
Restaurant Fournaise,” also in the Art Institute collection. The painting was already under way by April 19, 1881, when, at lunch in Chatou with the American painter James McNeill Whistler, Renoir spoke of postponing
a planned trip to London: “The weather is fine and I have my models; that’s my only excuse.” The young woman in this painting wears the blue flannel dress favored by lady boaters at the time. She and the girl at her
side were not actually related. The art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel invented the title “Two Sisters” when he bought the painting from Renoir in July 1881.
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