Renoir - Path Leading through Tall Grass

Path Leading through Tall Grass (Chemin montant dans les hautes herbes), around 1875 - Pierre-Auguste Renoir, oil on canvas. Pierre-Auguste Renoir (Limoges, 1841 - Cagnes-sur-Mer, 1919) was a French Impressionist painter. This landscape, probably painted in the suburbs of Paris, was certainly made before 1880, in the years when Renoir was fully committed to painting outdoor light with broken colour. As often in his landscapes, there is a human presence: women and children stroll along a path winding up through the long grass. Vegetation dissolves into overlapping touches instead of precise detail, and the real subject is intense sunlight and atmospheric depth. Except for Pissarro, the Impressionists rarely painted in the fields, which makes this ordinary country path a direct experiment in outdoor light and colour.