Children Playing Ball

The French Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir embraced printmaking later in his career, producing over fifty etchings and lithographs in the 1890s. Color lithography had become a favored print medium for many Impressionist artists. Renoir collaborated with a master printer, Auguste Clot, to create this complex work which required six separate stones for the six colors used—pink, red, orange, green, blue, and black. Given the size of the image and number of stones printed, impressions vary, as it was difficult to achieve a perfect alignment and clean registration of colors as found in the present impression.