Pierre-Auguste Renoir - The Swing Magnet

The Swing (La Balançoire), 1876 - Pierre-Auguste Renoir, oil on canvas. Pierre-Auguste Renoir (Limoges, 1841 - Cagnes-sur-Mer, 1919) was a French Impressionist painter. He painted it in the summer of 1876 in the garden of his rented house on rue Cortot in Montmartre, at the same time as Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette. The models, Jeanne, a young woman from Montmartre, his brother Edmond and the painter Norbert Goeneutte, also appear among the dancers in the larger painting. A young man seen from behind talks to a young woman standing on a swing while a little girl watches, as if Renoir had surprised a conversation. Sunlight dappled by the leaves is rendered as patches of pale colour, a technique that annoyed critics at the Impressionist exhibition of 1877. Gustave Caillebotte bought the painting.