Landscape

Landscape, 1890, at the Barnes Foundation, belongs to a year when Renoir was working intensively in the Seine valley and its surrounding countryside, developing the more confident, freely painted landscape style that emerged after the tighter handling of his experimental 1880s work. The early 1890s saw him re-establishing the fluid, direct approach to outdoor painting that his 'dry period' of linear Ingres-influenced drawing had temporarily interrupted, now applied with greater chromatic assurance than his earlier Impressionist landscapes had shown. Albert Barnes collected Renoir's landscapes systematically alongside his figure paintings, convinced — against much critical opinion that dismissed them as secondary work — that the landscape canvases were essential to understanding how his colour sense developed through sustained direct observation of natural light. Barnes's great democratic conviction was that the full range of an artist's output, including the less celebrated works, was necessary to understanding their intelligence, and his Renoir landscape holdings reflect this principle.

The brushwork is characteristically free, with varied directional strokes building vegetation and sky through chromatic juxtaposition. Renoir's 1890 landscapes typically show a warmer, more saturated palette than his earlier work, reflecting the influence of his Italian journey and his growing preference for southern light effects.