Music & the Piano Collection: Pierre-Auguste Renoir Oil Painting Reproductions
These 14 works are built around an instrument, and most around a piano. The subject arrived properly in 1892, when the French state commissioned a painting for the Musee du Luxembourg and Renoir produced Young Girls at the Piano, working through at least five full versions before he was satisfied. Two girls lean over a keyboard, one seated and one standing behind, in a warm domestic interior with a curtain and a vase of flowers. It is the most carefully constructed picture of his later career and, not coincidentally, the one that finally made him respectable. Around it sit the guitar and mandolin players, the singers, and a handful of interiors where an instrument anchors the composition. Music gave him what a book gave him in the reading pictures: a reason for the figures to be absorbed, turned toward each other rather than toward the painter.
Showing all 16 results
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A Box at the Theater (At the Concert)
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Girls at the Piano
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Leaving the Conservatory (La Sortie du conservatoire)
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piano lesson
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The Concert
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The Daughters of Catulle Mendès
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The guitar player
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The Serenade
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Two Young Girls at the Piano
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Woman at the Piano
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Woman Playing a Guitar
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Woman with a Guitar
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Young Girls at the Piano
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Young girls at the piano
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Young Spanish Woman with a Guitar
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Yvonne and Christine Lerolle at the Piano
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Five versions of one picture
The 1892 state commission mattered enormously to Renoir, who had spent thirty years outside official favour. He painted the two girls at the piano over and over, changing the curtain, the flowers and the placement of the arms, and the versions now hang in Paris, New York and elsewhere. Comparing them is the clearest available lesson in how he actually worked: not by inspiration but by patient adjustment.
Instruments as composition
A piano gives a painter a horizontal, a music sheet gives a bright rectangle, and a guitar gives a curve. In every one of these pictures the instrument does structural work, holding the figures in place and giving the eye a route between them. Remove it and the composition falls apart, which is not true of, say, a hat.
Which room this collection suits
The obvious wall is the one behind or beside an actual piano, and it is a genuinely good pairing. Beyond that, these suit a sitting room or a study: warm interiors, absorbed figures, nothing demanding. Because they are interior scenes with several elements, they need a little size to read properly, seventy to one hundred centimetres on the long side. They are also among the few Renoirs that look right in a formal, traditionally furnished room.
Frequently asked questions
How many versions of Young Girls at the Piano are there?
At least five painted versions plus drawings and a pastel. Renoir was working toward a state commission and reworked the composition repeatedly before delivering it.
Why is this collection small?
Because Renoir came to the subject late and treated it as a set-piece rather than a habit. Fourteen canvases is the whole of it, which makes them relatively uncommon on walls.
Is this a good picture to hang above a piano?
It is one of the few subjects where the obvious choice is also the right one. Keep the canvas narrower than the instrument below it, and hang it high enough to clear a raised lid.
What is the mood of these pictures?
Domestic and warm rather than performative. Nobody is on a stage: two girls are working out a piece of music in a family sitting room, and the picture is about their attention rather than about the music.