Madame Georges Charpentier and Her Children by Pierre-Auguste Renoir gathers a mother and her two young children together in a richly furnished interior, set among patterned upholstery, fabric and a family pet at their feet. The brushwork is fluid and assured, the palette built on creamy whites, deep blacks, and warm flesh tones in the manner of his ambitious large-scale portraits. The grand family portrait, scaled for the salon and built on careful arrangement of figures and decor, was a sustained ambition in nineteenth-century French painting. The picture distills a hushed domestic gathering into a luminous Impressionist composition.