The Sisters

Gari Melchers

National Gallery of Art

Two pale-skinned girls stand hand in hand in a grassy field in this vertical painting. To our left, the younger girl is about two heads shorter than her companion and holds a doll clutched in the crook of her right arm. She has short, light blond hair, and she stares at us or just above our heads with wide, blue eyes. She has round cheeks, and her rosebud-shaped mouth is parted. She wears a moss-green skirt patterned with lilac-purple flowers, a tan sash around her waist, and a shirt with violet-purple and navy-blue, vertical stripes on the torso and elbow-length white sleeves. One calf-high boot slouches down and the other brushes the bottom of her flaring skirts. Her doll wears a grayish-blue dress with a brown hem and fog-gray stockings. The taller girl on our right holds the smaller girl’s hand and turns to look down at her. Her cheeks are rosy, and her flaxen yellow hair falls nearly to her shoulders. She wears a vivid, apricot-orange dress with elbow-length sleeves, a light blue kerchief tied in a bow around her neck, and dark brown stockings and shoes. The girls stand close to each other and us in front of a grassy field dotted with blue, yellow, and white flowers. Two white goats graze in the distance behind the smaller girl. Reddish brown roofs suggest that houses nestle into a dip beyond the meadow. Smoke curls from a couple chimneys. The horizon nearly reaches the top edge of the painting so only a sliver of silvery gray sky lines the top of the composition. The artist signed the bottom right corner: “Gari Melchers.”