The archive / Impressionism / Two Sisters (On the Terrace)
Two Sisters (On the Terrace)
Pierre-Auguste Renoir · 1841–1919
3 variations + a matched story print, every standard frame ratio. sRGB · up to 300 DPI · personal-use license.
Print it your way — at home, a local shop, or a gallery print delivered to your door. See the printing guide →
Sizes in the download
Print-ready files at every standard frame ratio below — the full image, nothing cropped:
The print is crisp at 300 DPI up to about 30×40″, and stays sharp at 150 DPI from across the room, out to about 40×60″.
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The work
The sisters were never sisters.
Look at the two faces and you reach for a family resemblance. There isn't one. The seated young woman was Jeanne Darlaud, an 18-year-old aspiring actress born Eugénie Marie Darlaud; the little girl beside her has never been identified. They were not siblings. "Two Sisters" was a title Renoir invented, not a fact he recorded.
A picture of many names
Even its title kept changing hands.
The title on the wall is only the latest of several. Renoir called the canvas Les deux sœurs. When the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel bought it, he entered it in his books as Femme sur une terrasse au bord de la Seine, and it was later listed as Femme sur une terrasse (Chatou). The "On the Terrace" we use today comes straight from those dealer ledgers.
Look closer
Two halves of one canvas, painted two ways.
Run your eye from the faces to the foliage behind them and the hand changes. The two figures are finely modelled, worked with a controlled brush; the background stays loose, almost a sketch. Technical imaging confirms the split. X-ray and infrared also catch Renoir at work: he reshaped the woman's head and hat, drew her right arm in closer to her body, and outlined some forms in red lake.
I am struggling with trees in bloom, with women and children, and wish to see nothing beyond that.— Pierre-Auguste Renoir, letter to Théodore Duret, written from Chatou, 18 April 1881
The file & the facts
- Title
- Two Sisters (On the Terrace)
- Artist
- Pierre-Auguste Renoir
- Year
- 1881
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Original
- 100.4 × 80.9 cm
- Collection
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Rights
- Public-domain painting · open access · Art Institute of Chicago — Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial Collection, 1933.455 (CC0, courtesy)
- File
- sRGB · JPEG · 150–300 DPI
