Description
An older girl, maybe eight or nine, sits with a younger child settled heavily into her lap, one small hand pressed to a biscuit that has nearly reached the toddler’s mouth. The little one’s eyes are closed, lashes down, cheeks flushed pink, that particular sleepy, sated look of a child mid snack. The older sister watches with a quiet, unhurried attention, her head tilted down, dark auburn hair falling loose around her face.
Renoir paints the whole scene in a narrow, warm range: rust and chestnut in the hair, dull gold and sage in the knitted sweaters, a soft lavender-grey wall behind them that never competes with the two heads. The brushwork is thick and worked over in the faces, built up in small strokes around the eyes and mouths, then loosens into long, dry drags across the sweaters, so the wool seems to catch actual light.
What holds the composition together is the diagonal made by the two heads, dark hair above blond, and the small triangle of hands meeting at the biscuit. It is an unglamorous, physical kind of tenderness, a heavier child settled into a lap, an arm braced to take the weight, rather than anything posed or sentimental. Mothers absorbed in the weight and fuss of a small child are one of the most constant threads running through his work, long before and after he had sons of his own to paint.
At a distance the picture reads as a single warm, huddled shape against a pale ground, ideal for close viewing where the layered, buttery paint around the faces really shows itself.
