Renoir paid two unrelated models. The older one was Jeanne Darlot, eighteen, who later became an actress; nobody has ever established who the child was. He put them together on a restaurant terrace beside the Seine in the spring of 1881, and then called the picture Two Sisters.
The terrace
The balcony belongs to the Maison Fournaise, a restaurant on an island in the Seine at Chatou, west of Paris, where the rowing crowd stopped and Renoir ate for years. He was working there constantly around 1880 and 1881, and the same railing stands behind the people in Luncheon of the Boating Party.
Over it you get shrubs, blossom, the river and a couple of boats, all of it loosened into dabs. He began in April 1881.
On 7 July the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel bought it for fifteen hundred francs, and it was shown to the public for the first time at the seventh Impressionist exhibition in the spring of 1882. The canvas is a metre tall, so the older girl is close to life size.
The wool in the basket
In front of them sits a small basket of wool, and the skeins in it are several different colours for no domestic reason whatever. They are there to answer the flowers piled on the child's bonnet and to put something against the red of the hat, which is the loudest thing in the picture.
The two faces are painted tight and smooth, almost glazed, the way he always painted a face, while everything past the railing is dissolved into weather. So there are two manners of painting in one canvas, and the railing is the border between them.
The older girl wears the blue flannel of a boating outfit with a small bunch of flowers at the collar. Neither of them is doing anything at all, which is the subject.
Two titles, two prices
The double title is two people's work. Two Sisters is Renoir's. On the Terrace came from Durand-Ruel — and the entry he made in his own stock book in 1881 calls it a woman on a terrace at the edge of the Seine. One woman. Singular. No family at all.
He paid fifteen hundred francs for it in July 1881. His New York house sold it in February 1925 to Annie Coburn of Chicago for a hundred thousand dollars, and she left it to the Art Institute in 1933.
Between those two numbers the thing it was called changed more than once. Darlot died in 1914. The child has no name on any record, and has been somebody's sister for a hundred and forty years.
Renoir called them sisters; his dealer wrote down one woman. Two strangers on a terrace have been family ever since.
Some stories are better over a coffee. Fifteen minutes with someone — audio only, not open yet.