Two Sisters (On the Terrace)
From $289
Collection
Children and family
Renoir's two sisters, Cassatt's bath, a girl watering a garden — paintings of childhood that are not sentimental.
Paintings of children have a bad reputation, and mostly deserve it: the genre is full of curls and rosy cheeks and nothing else. The six here are the exception. Renoir paints two sisters who are clearly bored of each other on a terrace. Cassatt paints a mother holding a wet child with the mother's attention elsewhere. Klimt paints three ages of a woman in one canvas, and does not flinch.
That honesty is why they work as gifts rather than as decorations. A painting of a child given to a parent, a grandparent, or a grown-up daughter lands differently from a framed photograph, because it has already been interpreted by someone else.
If what you want is your own children in this register, that is a commission rather than a reproduction — and the honest advice is that a good photograph matters more than the style you choose. We wrote about what makes a usable reference photo for exactly this reason.
How to size a painting in this collection
Small is right for this collection. These are domestic pictures and they belong at the scale of the people in them: 16 × 20 or 20 × 24 inches covers a nursery wall or the space above a child's bed without dominating it.
Glass and children do not mix happily, which is an argument for oil over a framed print: an oil on canvas can be wiped with a dry cloth and has no glazing to break.
Where to go next
Every painting in this collection is made to order and can be produced in a size that is not listed. Prices on each page are the published starting price for the smallest canvas; larger sizes step up on the same ladder, so there is no quote to wait for.
Questions
Questions about this collection
Yes, and it is the same process as any portrait commission: send two or three clear photographs, receive a digital mock-up, approve it, then two progress photographs while it is painted. Prices start at $289 for a single subject and are published on the commission page.
Up to six comfortably. Above that the faces get small and the painting starts to read as a group photo rather than a portrait; we will say so before you order rather than after.
For parents and grandparents, it is one of the few gifts that does not get stored in a cupboard. Allow five weeks: three to five weeks of painting plus transit, and slightly longer in November and December when the studio queue is deepest.
Wall measured, painting chosen?
Send the wall dimensions and the piece you have in mind. We will confirm the size that keeps the composition intact and the date we can actually keep.