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Lot Essay
Pierre-Auguste Renoir extensively explored landscape painting throughout his decades-long career. A quintessential Impressionist subject, the landscape offered Renoir a dual benefit by allowing him to move away from studio practices and paint en-plein-air while also engaging with masters of the genre such as Corot and the Barbizon school artists, whose work he studied during his time as a student at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
In the present work, Renoir employs quick brushwork to apply multitude of colors in daring combinations. Balancing the vivid tonal greens of the meadows with dynamic blues of the stream, he illustrates the energetic pull of the water; the sky is equally animated and masterfully rendered through a blend of blue, pink, and white pigments. A celebration of nature’s beauty and harmony, La Prairie exemplifies Renoir’s profound understanding of composition and masterful handling of paint and illustrates John Rewald’s apt praise that Renoir was, perhaps better than any of his contemporaries, able to “build with brilliant and strong colors an image of life in almost supernatural intensity” (The History of Impressionism, London, 1973, p. 584).
In the present work, Renoir employs quick brushwork to apply multitude of colors in daring combinations. Balancing the vivid tonal greens of the meadows with dynamic blues of the stream, he illustrates the energetic pull of the water; the sky is equally animated and masterfully rendered through a blend of blue, pink, and white pigments. A celebration of nature’s beauty and harmony, La Prairie exemplifies Renoir’s profound understanding of composition and masterful handling of paint and illustrates John Rewald’s apt praise that Renoir was, perhaps better than any of his contemporaries, able to “build with brilliant and strong colors an image of life in almost supernatural intensity” (The History of Impressionism, London, 1973, p. 584).