Explore The Promenade

Read About This Painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir

We do not know what Pierre-Auguste Renoir titled this painting. However, the title it was given by a previous owner, The Promenade, honors earlier artists that Renoir greatly admired. The subject of this painting was inspired by the lighthearted paintings of garden jaunts of eighteenth-century painters such as Jean-Antoine Watteau and Jean-Honoré Fragonard, whose works he had studied in the Louvre museum in Paris. Before making this painting, Renoir spent the previous summer painting outdoors with Claude Monet, who encouraged him to move toward a lighter, more luminous palette, and to indulge his fondness for luscious, feathery brushwork.

This painting captures a fleeting moment caught by chance—representing middle-class Parisians immersed in nature, possibly a local park. The dappled light filtering through the foliage would later become a trademark of Renoir’s finest Impressionist works of the 1870s and 1880s. He used a thin, oily paint mix, in which the glazes float into each other to create a sense of depth and texture.

Questions

Read or discuss your responses.

• What do you see in this painting?

• What are the subjects doing? How do you know?

• What else do you notice about each character?

• What is the setting of the painting? Identify areas in the painting with shadows and light.

• Look closely at the visible brushstrokes that make up this painting. What do you notice about the movement and energy of each stroke?

In late 19th-century France, some artists painted pictures that look like they were quickly sketched, using lots of small dots and strokes of color to create scenes that capture feelings and moments, like the way sunlight looks on water or the colors of a garden.