Artwork story
About Madame Georges Charpentier (Marguerite-Louise Lemonnier, 1848–1904) and Her Children, Georgette-Berthe (1872–1945) and Paul-Emile-Charles (1875–1895)
The artist and artwork
Auguste Renoir painted Madame Georges Charpentier and Her Children in 1878 as a large oil-on-canvas commission. The family occupies a Japanese-style sitting room in its Paris townhouse, but Renoir keeps the arrangement intimate: Marguerite Charpentier rests against a patterned sofa while Georgette and Paul cluster beside her and the family's Newfoundland dog sprawls across the foreground. Loose, broken strokes make silk, lace, fur, upholstery, flowers, and gilded screens shimmer, yet the seated figures retain the compositional gravity of an old-master family portrait.
The world around it
Renoir had helped organize the independent Impressionist exhibitions after the official Salon rejected several of his pictures. In 1879, however, he declined the fourth Impressionist show and returned to the Salon with this portrait. Marguerite was the wife of prominent publisher Georges Charpentier and hosted a literary salon attended by Gustave Flaubert, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, and Émile Zola. She used her influence to secure the painting a choice position; its success became a turning point, bringing Renoir patrons and making society portraiture financially sustaining. The family's Japanese décor also advertises the era's advanced Parisian taste for art from Japan.
A detail to notice
The child beside Marguerite is her three-year-old son, Paul, not a second daughter. His hair remained uncut according to contemporary fashion, and he wears a blue-and-white outfit nearly identical to his sister Georgette's. Georgette, meanwhile, does not use a chair: she perches on the patient black-and-white dog, whose broad body anchors the entire family group. A golden screen with peacocks fills the wall, glass and flowers sparkle at right, and Marguerite's black dress spreads across nearly half the canvas. Renoir lets fashionable possessions announce wealth, but the children's matching clothes and relaxed poses make the first surprise one of identity rather than luxury.
Look closer: materials, scale, and subjects
The recorded object is painting made in Oil on canvas and held in the European Paintings department.
Recorded dimensions include 60 1/2 x 74 7/8 in. (153.7 x 190.2 cm).
Subject terms include Interiors, Boys, Girls, Portraits, Women, and Dogs. Treat them as guideposts, not a complete interpretation.
Collection history and public-domain source
The collection credit line is Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Wolfe Fund, 1907.
The individual artwork page and official image were verified as Public Domain on 2026-08-23.
No Context Gallery independently uses the public-domain image. The source museum has not endorsed, sponsored, or affiliated itself with these products.
Research sources
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