Landscape between Storms

The Impressionists were drawn to atmospheric instability — fog, rain, the moments before or after storms — because these conditions justified the broken, unresolved surfaces that their critics found incomprehensible in plain weather. Landscape between Storms at the National Gallery of Art belongs to the pure landscape output that Renoir produced in 1875 alongside his more characteristic figure subjects, and the choice of a meteorologically turbulent subject connects him to the broader Impressionist project of rendering transience rather than fixed appearances. Renoir's landscapes from this period are less studied and serial than Monet's but no less acute in their responses to specific atmospheric conditions. The disturbed sky of this canvas — painted in the variable weather of the Seine valley rather than in any fixed location — shows him working with the Impressionist vocabulary of rapid brushwork and tonal contrast as a means of capturing what the eye actually sees in changing light rather than what the mind knows a landscape to look like. The painting's presence in the NGA alongside Monet, Pissarro, and Sisley canvases allows it to be read within the collective achievement of early Impressionist landscape rather than as an anomalous deviation from Renoir's figure work.

The sky receives unusually sustained attention, rendered through rapidly varying strokes of grey, ochre, and pale blue conveying atmospheric movement. The landscape below is handled more broadly, terrain suggested through tonal shifts.