“Painted in two stages, with a gap of around four years between each stage, it shows the change in Renoir’s art during the 1880s, when he was beginning to move away from Impressionism and looking instead to classical art. The group on the right, which includes a mother and her two daughters and the woman…

“During the early 1870s, Renoir and Monet often painted side by side, producing images of the same subject and sometimes using each other—and other family members—as models. In Renoir’s informal portrait of Camille Monet, the painter’s wife sits on a comfortable sofa reading a paperback book. Small touches of color cover the canvas like stitches…