Woman at the Piano

The domestic piano, which became a standard bourgeois household fixture in France during the Second Empire and Third Republic, was the primary vehicle through which musical culture entered middle-class daily life. Young women of the bourgeoisie were expected to play — it was among the social accomplishments that defined feminine cultivation — and images of women at the keyboard were among the most reliable subject types in both Salon and Impressionist painting. Renoir returned to this subject across his career, most famously in the large 1892 canvas Girls at the Piano now at the Musée d'Orsay, but this 1875 Woman at the Piano at the Art Institute of Chicago is an earlier, more Impressionistically immediate version of the same fundamental subject. The 1875 date places the canvas in the year of the disastrous Drouot auction, when the Impressionists' attempt to sell works directly to the public produced a disaster that financially injured several of the participants. Renoir's response was to paint prolifically, and the looseness of touch in this canvas reflects his rapid production during this difficult year. Contemporaries including Degas and Mary Cassatt were also painting piano subjects, and the collective Impressionist engagement with domestic music as a subject represents one of the movement's most sustained investigations of bourgeois interior life.

Renoir unifies the figure and the piano's warm wooden surface through a closely related warm tonality, differentiating them through the cooler, lighter tones of the woman's dress. The keyboard is loosely indicated, more evocative than descriptive.