The Tuileries Gardens, Paris

The Tuileries Gardens, Paris at Kelvingrove Art Gallery in Glasgow, painted in 1900, is the companion piece to the Kelvingrove's Renoir Painter's Garden — two artists of the same generation represented in the same Glasgow collection, each engaged with garden subjects in the first year of the new century. The Tuileries, painted from the rue de Rivoli, gave Pissarro the most formal of all French garden subjects: Le Nôtre's seventeenth-century design, with its axial allées, circular basins, and statuary, was the prototype of French landscape design and carried the weight of the ancien régime's aesthetic programme. His Impressionist treatment — dissolving the formal garden's geometric precision into a shimmering surface of broken colour and light — was not an act of formal disrespect but an insistence that the garden's living reality in time and light was more interesting than any design programme. The Kelvingrove's pairing of this Tuileries canvas with its other Pissarro holdings allows the full range of his garden subjects — from the intimate Éragny kitchen garden to the grandest public garden in France — to be appreciated.

Pissarro uses short, mosaic-like strokes to build the variegated surface of the garden — greens of different temperatures for foliage, cool greys for paths, warm tones for figures. The elevated viewpoint eliminates conventional perspective in favor of a flattened, tapestry-like composition.