The title tells you these two are sisters, sharing a terrace above a river, one holding a ball of yarn and knitting needles, the other with flowers in her lap and a hat trimmed in red. But the title is a bit of a fiction.
What you're looking at
Renoir painted Two Sisters (On the Terrace) in 1881, showing two young women on a balcony overlooking the Seine, baskets of yarn and flowers between them, boats visible on the water behind. It's a warm, sunlit scene, painted with Renoir's characteristically soft, feathery brushwork.
Not sisters, and a hidden couple in the water
According to the Art Institute of Chicago's own record, which holds the painting, Renoir's two models were unrelated to each other, despite the title that's stuck to the painting ever since. And deep in the background river, visible only in the museum's own 489-megapixel scan of the canvas, sits a couple in a rowboat that almost nobody has ever noticed in over a century of viewing the painting in person.
That tiny rowboat scene is there on a high-resolution print too, waiting for someone patient enough to look for it. It's a reminder that even a painting this famous and this often reproduced can still hide details that most viewers walk right past.
One detail to look for
Scan the river behind the two women, roughly in the middle distance among the other boats. Look for a small rowboat carrying two more figures, painted at a scale so small it nearly disappears into the water and the background greenery.
See it at its real size
Our canvas print is labeled against the true size of the original, 100.4 x 80.9 cm, so what you're hanging is honestly scaled — and detailed enough that the rowboat couple is still there to find. Shop the canvas print.