Mother Anthony's Tavern

Mother Anthony's Tavern at Marlotte is one of the most historically important paintings in Renoir's early output: a group portrait of young artists at a specific moment of formation, before Impressionism as a movement had named itself or defined its programme. The Inn of Mère Anthony at Marlotte was a meeting place for painters working in the tradition of the Barbizon school and for the emerging generation that would transform French painting in the 1870s. Alfred Sisley, identified among the figures, was among Renoir's oldest painting companions, the two men having studied together under Gleyre and remaining close throughout the formative years. The painting was made in 1866, during one of Renoir's extended working periods at the Le Coeur family property, and the tavern interior — with its rough wooden tables, regional wall decoration, and casual arrangement of friends — gives the canvas a documentary quality unusual in the French painting of the period. Most group portraits of artists in the nineteenth century were formal studio arrangements; this is an informal record of how young painters actually spent their time, eating, drinking, and talking about painting in the countryside outside Paris. The Nationalmuseum in Stockholm holds the painting as part of its important collection of French nineteenth-century art.

The large interior scene is painted with a naturalist directness appropriate to a real location and real sitters, the warm interior light cast by the tavern windows carefully observed. The composition is relaxed and informal, the figures arranged around a table in conversation, giving the work a genre-painting quality that distinguishes it from formal group portraiture. The paint handling is tighter than Renoir's later Impressionist work, reflecting his still-developing style.