Meadow (La Prairie)

Meadow (La Prairie) by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, painted around 1880 and now at the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania, depicts an open field in the kind of naturalistic outdoor setting that Renoir shared with Monet as the primary subject of plein-air Impressionist landscape painting. Albert C. Barnes assembled his collection with particular attention to Renoir, and the Barnes Foundation holds one of the largest and finest groups of Renoir's works anywhere in the world. The meadow subject — apparently simple but demanding in its requirement for color-based spatial construction without the organizing structures of architecture or linear elements — was a touchstone for Renoir's landscape practice.

Renoir renders the meadow through a mosaic of color strokes — greens, yellows, pinks — that describe the complexity of an unmown field without resorting to photographic detail. The sky above and the treeline beyond are handled with a lighter touch than the foreground vegetation. Any figures that appear in the field are integrated into the color environment through sympathetic color rather than defined by outline.