On the Grass (Jeunes femmes assises dans l'herbe)

On the Grass (Jeunes femmes assises dans l'herbe) of 1873 is an early major work painted when Renoir was thirty-two years old and fully embarked on the Impressionist project with Monet, Pissarro, and their circle. The year 1873 was the eve of the first Impressionist exhibition — which would open at Nadar's studio in April 1874 — and this canvas belongs to the body of work Renoir was producing in preparation for that landmark public debut. Two young women seated on grass in outdoor light was a subject type he shared with Monet, whose garden and outdoor figure subjects of the same period explored similar questions about how Impressionist technique could capture figures in dappled natural light. The freshness of the painting — its loose brushwork, its capture of filtered outdoor light on white and light-colored dresses, its sense of the actual experience of sitting on grass in warm light — demonstrates the core Impressionist values that he was among the first generation to develop. The Barnes Foundation's acquisition of this early major work placed it alongside his mature figure painting as evidence of his early mastery, before the more systematic explorations of the later 1870s and 1880s.

Renoir uses dappled, broken brushwork throughout, the grass rendered in short, varied green and yellow strokes. The figures' white and light-coloured dresses are treated as vehicles for recording the play of sunlight. The composition is open and horizontal, with no strong compositional armature — allowing the light to be the unifying element.