Renoir, Pierre-Auguste (1841-1919)
Dans la prairie (In the Meadow)
1888–1892
Oil on canvas, 81.3 x 65.4 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Between 1888 and 1892 Renoir painted a number of works in which the same pair of girls—the blonde wearing a white frock and the brunette a pink one—engage in leisurely pastimes. Here, they pick flowers; the same models appear at the piano in a painting now in the Museum‘s Lehman Collection (1975.1.201). These intimate genre scenes, which celebrate youthful innocence, found a ready market in the early 1890s. (MET)