On the Terrace
by Renoir
On the terrace is a painting by the French painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, made in 1881 and kept at The Art Institute in Chicago.
Originally named Les Deux Sœurs (the current title was awarded by the first owner Paul Durand-Ruel), the painting depicts actress Darlaud with her three-year-old daughter while relaxing on the terrace of an island restaurant of Chatou, on the banks of the Seine. The woman has a serene and carefree face: the little girl, framed by an exuberant flowered hat, is slightly intimidated and approaches imperceptibly to her mother, throwing an obsessive and tenderly intimidated look to the observer. [1]
In addition to them there is a balustrade and dense river vegetation, elements with which the painter clearly separates the foreground from the landscape background. The landscape is of great quality and depicts the Seine with some canniers and, on the other side, some houses with clear and almost blinding walls. On the terrace, the painter’s luminary sensitivity is exemplified, and he has offered examples of his own ability to shape the light already in paintings such as Breakfast by the River or as the Portrait of Alphonsine Fournaise.
The work, begun in April 1881, was purchased on July 7th of the same year by well-known art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel for a fine figure of 1,500 francs. The work, exhibited to the public in the spring of 1882 at the seventh exhibition of Impressionists, arrived in 1883 in the hands of Charles Ephrussi, and then returned again in 1892 in the Durand-Ruel collection. In 1925, the painting was finally sold for one hundred thousand dollars by a Chicago collector, Annie S. Coburn, and in 1933 he was generously donated to the art museum of the same city where he can still be admired. [2]
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