The Promenade

What Pierre-Auguste Renoir himself titled this painting is unknown, but *La Promenade* is in part an homage to earlier artists whom he greatly admired. Renoir had spent the previous summer painting outdoors with Claude Monet, who encouraged him to move toward a lighter, more luminous palette and to indulge his penchant for luscious, feathery brushwork. Here Renoir retained something of Gustave Courbet's green-and-brown palette while choosing his subject from the sensual, lighthearted garden jaunts of eighteenth-century painters such as Jean-Antoine Watteau and Jean-Honoré Fragonard, whose works he had studied in the Louvre. Unlike the images of seduction created by his predecessors, Renoir's is a fleeting moment caught by chance--middle-class Parisians immersed in nature, possibly a local park, not set before a studio backdrop. The dappled light filtering through the foliage would become a trademark of Renoir's finest Impressionist works of the 1870s and 1880s. He used a thin, oily paint mix, his glazes here floating into each other to create depth.