Girls Picking Flowers in a Meadow by Renoir in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, January 2018

Girls Picking Flowers in a Meadow

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (French, 1841–1919)

about 1890

Medium/Technique: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 65.1 x 81 cm (25 5/8 x 31 7/8 in.)

Credit Line: Juliana Cheney Edwards Collection

Accession Number: 39.675

Collections: Europe

Classifications: Paintings

Renoir spent the summer of 1890 at the country house of fellow Impressionist Berthe Morisot and her husband Eugène Manet, Edouard Manet’s brother. Renoir asked their daughter, Julie, to pose for him, along with her fair-haired cousin, Jeanne Gobillard. Renoir gives the girls—their bonnets elaborately ruffled and ribboned—the fanciful air of shepherdesses in a rococo pastoral, taking his cue from the 18th-century artist François Boucher and his airy, make-believe scenes. With its flowering sapling at left, the picture also reads as an allegory of budding maturity.

Inscriptions: Lower right: Renoir

Provenance: February 3, 1892, sold by the artist to Durand-Ruel, Paris and New York (stock no. 2048); 1912, sold by Durand-Ruel to Hannah Marcy Edwards (d. 1929), Boston; 1929, by inheritance to her sister, Grace M. Edwards (d. 1938), Boston; 1939, bequest of Hannah Marcy Edwards to the MFA [see note 1]. (Accession Date: October 11, 1939)

NOTES:
[1] Siblings Robert (d. 1924), Hannah (d. 1929), and Grace (d. 1938) Edwards were each collectors of art, who seemed to have had joint ownership of the objects in their possession. When Robert died, he bequeathed his collection to the MFA in memory of their mother, Juliana Cheney Edwards. In 1925, after his death, part of his collection was acquired by the Museum, and the remainder went to his sisters, with the understanding that the objects would ultimately be left to the MFA in the collection begun in memory of their mother. The collections of Hannah and Grace were left to the MFA in 1939, following Grace's death. It is not always possible to determine exactly which paintings each sibling had owned.

Text from: collections.mfa.org/objects/32703/girls-picking-flowers-in-a-meadow