In late 1891 or early 1892 Renoir was invited by the French government to execute a painting for a new museum in Paris, the Musée du Luxembourg, which was to be devoted to the work of living artists. He chose as his subject two girls at the piano. Aware of the intense scrutiny to which his submission would be subjected, Renoir lavished extraordinary care on this project, developing and refining the composition in a series of five canvases. The Lehman painting and the nearly identical version formerly in the collection of Renoir's fellow Impressionist Gustave Caillebotte have long been regarded as the most accomplished variants of this intimate and engaging scene of bourgeois domestic life.

Anders Andersen-Lundby was a Danish landscape painter from Lundby Hills at Aalborg, Denmark. In 1861, when he was twenty, Andersen-Lundby traveled to Copenhagen, and there he exhibited his works for the first time in 1864. By 1870, he gained popularity by exhibiting winter landscapes, a subject he continued to work with. In 1876, he moved to Munich with his family where he exhibited his paintings. However, he frequently visited Denmark and participated in exhibitions there.

On this day in 1839, the French artist and painter, a prominent representative of post-impressionism, Paul Cézanne was born. The artist had a huge influence on the masters of the 20th century, including Henri Matisse, André Derain, Pablo Picasso. Cézanne painted the picture in his Parisian studio on the Val-de-Grâce: he dressed up his son Paul as Harlequin, and his friend as Pierrot. The boys had to pose for hours, and the shoemaker's son Louis Guillaume once fainted. Accustomed to painting landscapes and still lifes, Cézanne turned to composition with figures for the first time. In the process of working on the picture, live models (the artist was never able to give up nature) turned into mannequins. "This is not Pierrot and Harlequin. This is a monument to Pierrot and Harlequin," noted Yakov Tugendhold.