Madame Georges Charpentier and Her Children

Renoir painted this portrait of Madame Georges Charpentier and her two children in 1878, for the family's dining room in their townhouse on the Boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris. Marguerite Charpentier was the wife of Georges Charpentier, a publisher whose house was the center of the Paris literary world in the late 1870s. Zola, Flaubert, Maupassant, and the Goncourt brothers all came to her Thursday dinners. Renoir was a regular guest, and he painted several portraits of the family between 1876 and 1879. The canvas is large, over five feet wide. Madame Charpentier sits on a sofa at the right, wearing a blue-and-white striped dress, her body turned toward the viewer. Her son Paul sits on the floor at the left, playing with a toy dog. Her daughter Georgette sits on a chair beside her mother, looking directly at the painter. The room is furnished in the Japanese style that was fashionable in Paris in the 1870s: a painted screen, a blue-and-white ceramic vase, a rug with a geometric pattern. A large St. Bernard dog lies at the far left, barely visible in the shadows. Renoir was 37 in 1878 and had been painting portraits for the Charpentier family for two years. The Charpentiers were his most important patrons. They bought his work, fed him at their table, and introduced him to their wealthy friends, who also commissioned portraits. Without the Charpentiers, Renoir's career in the late 1870s would have been very different. He was still struggling financially, and the Impressionist group exhibitions had brought him more notoriety than income. The painting was exhibited at the Salon of 1879, where it was well received. Renoir had been rejected by the Salon jury several times in the 1870s, and this was his first major success at the official exhibition. The Charpentier connection helped: Madame Charpentier's social position gave the painting an audience that a typical Impressionist portrait would not have reached. After the Salon, Renoir began receiving portrait commissions from the Parisian upper middle class, which would sustain him for the next decade. Oil on canvas, 153 by 190 centimeters. Renoir painted with a loose, fluid touch, building the figures in warm flesh tones and soft blues. The blue of Madame Charpentier's dress is the dominant color, repeated in the vase, the rug, and the shadows of the sofa. The surface has the silky, brushed quality that distinguishes Renoir's portraits from the more broken touch of Monet or Pissarro. The horizontal format and warm palette make this print work well in a living room, dining room, or family room. The domestic subject and soft blues pair with traditional furniture, patterned rugs, and warm lighting. The 18x24 size is the best choice, as the composition needs width to read. The painting has a warm, social quality that suits rooms where people gather. The painting entered the Met's collection in 1907, purchased with the Wolfe Fund. It was one of the first Renoir paintings to enter an American museum. This is a public domain artwork (CC0), scanned from the original at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 18x24 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.