In the Meadow, 1888-92. Auguste Renoir. Oil on canvas. Bequest of Sam A. Lewisohn, 1951.
Between 1888 and 1892 Renoir painted a number of works in which the same pair of girls—the blonde wearing a white frock and the brunette a pink one—engage in leisurely pastimes. Here, they pick flowers; the same models appear at the piano in a painting now in the Museum's Lehman Collection (Two Young Girls at the Piano). These intimate genre scenes, which celebrate youthful innocence, found a ready market in the early 1890s.