La Promenade

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La Promenade: Pierre-Auguste Renoir

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Pierre-Auguste Renoir Oil Painting - La Promenade

Keywords: Promenade

Work Overview: La Promenade
Artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Year 1870
Medium Oil on canvas
Dimensions 81.3 cm × 65 cm (32.0 in × 26 in)
Location Getty Center

La Promenade is an oil on canvas, early Impressionist painting by the French artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir, created in 1870. The work depicts a young couple on an excursion outside of the city, walking on a path through a woodland.[1] Influenced by the rococo revival style during the Second Empire, Renoir's La Promenade reflects the older style and themes of eighteenth-century artists like Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Jean-Antoine Watteau. The work also shows the influence of Claude Monet on Renoir's new approach to painting.

The forest was a popular landscape subject for nineteenth-century French artists, particularly the forest of Fontainebleau. Before Renoir, Claude Monet (1840–1926) painted Bazille and Camille (Study for "Déjeuner sur l'Herbe") (1865), showing a couple together in the forest. In 1869, Renoir and Monet spent time painting together at La Grenouillère. By 1870, Renoir was living in Louveciennes with his mother.[1] Throughout this decade, the eighteenth-century rococo art movement was back in style and Renoir embraced it.[2][3] France declared war against Germany on July 19, 1870, starting the Franco-Prussian War. Renoir was conscripted and served four months in the cavalry but never saw combat.

A young man, possibly a canotier, boatman, given his distinctive boater hat, holds the hand of a young woman on a path surrounded by bushes, perhaps on the banks of the Seine, with the implication of an upcoming intimate encounter.[1] The image of lovers walking through a woodland is based on a popular rococo theme.[2] Interpretations of the figure models vary. It is generally believed that the model for the woman in La Promenade was Lise Tréhot, Renoir's favorite model and companion during his early Salon period.[5] In the past, it was believed that the man in the painting was landscape painter Alfred Sisley (1839–1899) and the woman was Rapha, a companion of musician Edmond Maître (1840–1898).[6][7]

The original title of the painting is unknown. It first received the title La Promenade by unnamed owners of the work when it was put up for sale in 1898. It was not until 1941 that questions about the original title came to light. Renoir was known to strenuously object to sentimental titles applied by others to his work. "Why have they given names to my pictures which never represent the reason I painted such and such a subject? My joy consists in painting, and it has never been in my mind to paint a preconceived subject", Renoir said in his later years.[8] However, Renoir did exhibit a painting with the title of La Promenade in 1876, but that work is now known as Mother and Children.

In a commentary for the exhibition Origins of Impressionism (1994–95), Henri Loyrette writes that La Promenade "succeeds at last in what Renoir had for so long and so vainly sought: the integration of the figure in a landscape".[5] Loyrette notes the influence of Monet in La Promenade and the change in Renoir's style since Les Fiancés (1868).[5] The Impressionist influence on Renoir, Perrin Stein writes, led to his increasing use of the high-key palette.[7] Renoir's "lightness and delicacy of touch" here is, according to art historian John House, reminiscent of rococo artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806).[1] Critics also view the influence of Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) on this work, particularly in Renoir's use of the intimate couple in the woods, a motif popularized in scenes found in Watteau's fête galante genre.

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.

To late-twentieth-century eyes, Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s La Promenade raises few questions and poses few problems; indeed, little has been written about the picture, despite its regular appearance in exhibitions and the Renoir literature. This study of the work—a masterpiece from the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum—reveals surprising details about the artistic, historical, and moral contexts in which the painting was created.

John House, the author of this fascinating monograph, examines the many facets of the work and what it reveals about Renoir as a man and artist. He asks, “What did it mean to paint a picture like La Promenade in France in 1870, in the final months of Napoleon III’s Second Empire?” The reader is invited to look at the canvas—and Impressionism—as a rejection of the idealist world of academic art and as a challenge to contemporary social norms.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir: La Promenade is part of the Getty Museum Studies on Art series, designed to introduce individual artworks or small groups of related works to a broad public with an interest in the history of art.

Each monograph is written by a leading scholar and features a close discussion of its subject as well as a detailed analysis of the broader historical and cultural context in which the work was created.

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