The umbrellas

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The umbrellas: Pierre-Auguste Renoir

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Pierre-Auguste Renoir Oil Painting - The umbrellas

Keywords: umbrellas

Work Overview: The Umbrellas
French: Les Parapluies
Artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Year c. 1880–86
Type Oil
Medium Canvas
Dimensions 180.3 cm × 114.9 cm (71.0 in × 45.2 in)
Style Post-Impressionism
Period Rejection of Impressionism
Genre genre painting
Location Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin

The Umbrellas (French: Les Parapluies) is an oil-on-canvas painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, painted in two phases in the 1880s. It is owned by the National Gallery in London as part of the Lane Bequest but is displayed alternately in London and at the Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane. In May 2013, it returned to Dublin for a six-year period.

Renoir began the painting in about 1880–81, using the loose brushwork with dark and bright tones typical of the Impressionist movement. In about 1885-6, after losing his attachment to Impressionism and drawing inspiration from classical art he had seen in Italy and the works of Ingres and Cézanne, he reworked parts of the painting, particularly the principal female figure to the left of the frame, in a more classical linear style using more muted colours, and added the background and the umbrellas themselves. X-ray photography has shown that the clothing of the female figure was originally different: she wore a hat and her dress had horizontal rows of frills, with white lace at its cuffs and collar, suggesting that she was middle class, whereas the simpler clothes in the revised painting mark her out as a member of the working class, a grisette not a bourgeoise. The x-ray analysis and then the changing fashions allow the periods of work to be dated with reasonable accuracy.

The painting measures 180.3 centimetres (71.0 in) high by 114.9 centimetres (45.2 in) wide. It depicts a busy street scene in Paris, with most of the people depicted using umbrellas against the rain. To the right, a mother looks down at her daughters, each fashionably dressed in the styles of 1881 for the afternoon promenade. She largely conceals a female figure at the centre of the frame, caught in the act of raising or lowering her umbrella, suggesting that the rain is about to start or stop. The principal female figure to the left of the frame, a milliner's assistant or modiste modelled by Renoir's lover and frequent subject Suzanne Valadon, holds up her skirt against the mud and water on the road as she carries a hatbox, but has no hat, raincoat or umbrella.

A vigorous young bearded gentleman seems to be about to engage her, perhaps to offer her shelter under his umbrella. She, and one of the two girls to the right with a hoop and stick, look out at the viewer, while most of the other people go about their business. Unconventionally, the focus of the painting is not at its centre, and many of the figures are cut off by the frame as if the painting were a photograph. The composition appears natural, but the angles of the umbrellas are carefully arranged to form geometric shapes, with the main figure's bandbox and the girl's hoop adding rounded elements. The colours are largely blues and greys: a pattern of umbrella canopies across the top of the painting, and the dresses and coats of the people lower down.

The pigment analysis of Renoir's The Umbrellas conducted by the scientists at the National Gallery in London[2] confirmed the assumption that it was painted in two distinct stages as mentioned above. In the dress of the woman on the left two layers have been identified: the lower layer contains cobalt blue mixed with zinc yellow and red lake. This is a similar pigment mixture as used for the woman on the right and her two daughters. Both layers have been painted during the first phase in 1881. The upper layer of the dress of the woman on the right painted during the second stage in 1886 contains a mixture of ultramarine with other pigments with a distinctly less vivid grayish-blue color.

Renoir did not exhibit The Umbrellas straight away – he may have thought the combination of styles would be too challenging for the public – and he eventually sold the painting to the French art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel in 1892. He sold it to Sir Hugh Lane, who died in the sinking of the RMS Lusitania in 1915 and left this and other paintings to the Tate Gallery in London in his will. It came into the possession of the gallery in 1917 (although an unsigned codicil suggested that Lane had changed his mind before his death, and would have preferred the paintings to be displayed in Dublin). It was transferred to the National Gallery in 1935, but an agreement was reached in 1959 to alternate its display (with seven other paintings from the Lane Bequest) between London and Dublin. Exceptionally, it was loaned for an exhibition at the Frick Collection in New York in 2013.

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Renoir's 'Umbrellas' shows a bustling Paris street in the rain. The composition of the painting does not focus on the centre of the picture which is a tangle of hands. It even cuts off figures at either edge like a photographic snapshot. This kind of unconventional arrangement was something that several of the Impressionists, including Renoir and Degas, enjoyed experimenting with.

The work is particularly intriguing in that it shows the artist at two separate points in his career, the second of which was a moment of crisis as he fundamentally reconsidered his painting style.

When he began 'The Umbrellas' in 1880-1, Renoir was still using the typically loose brushwork and bright, pure colours of the Impressionist movement - the sort of technique he employed in 'The Skiff (La Yole)'. During the early 1880s, he became increasingly disillusioned with the Impressionist technique.

He began to look back to more traditional art: the drawings of Ingres and the 'purity and grandeur' of classical art. Returning to 'The Umbrellas', he repainted the figure on the left in a crisper style, using a more muted palette. The rapid changes in women's fashions allow us to date the second stage of the painting to 1885-6.

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“One of his most ambitious fulllength paintings of these years is The Umbrellas, a work probably begun in the autumn of 1881. This multifigured composition was undertaken without a client or destination in mind; by the time it was finished, in 1885, Renoir’s style had evolved from the luminous palette and feathery handling of Impressionism to the more linear and muted handling associated with his “Ingresque” period.
Six principal figures dominate the foreground; behind them appear innumerable heads and shoulders and at least twelve umbrellas in a seemingly endless vista. The group on the right consists of an elegantly attired mother accompanied by her two daughters. On the left, a tall young modiste, or milliner’s assistant, carries a cane bandbox over her left arm.
In the background, various diminutive figures, all in hats, raise their umbrellas. The trees at upper left, in full leaf but with touches of brown, might suggest springtime or early autumn. The location of the scene is also ambiguous: from the sea of umbrellas emerge the roof of a kiosk faintly outlined in red at upper left and the blue – gray façade of a distant apartment building at upper right. These are the sole indicators of the modern Parisian boulevard.
It has long been recognized that The Umbrellas was painted in two stages, at least four years apart. Renoir initially may have conceived of his painting as a frieze of fashionably dressed women of different ages and classes shown in an elegant Parisian park. His reworking of the canvas in 1885 led him to adjust the two figures on the left and to include the many supporting figures in the background as well as all the umbrellas.
The disjunctions of facture and fashion that made The Umbrellas difficult to sell during Renoir’s life have assumed different values over time. The juxtaposition of modern and old – fashioned clothing has become far less noticeable and is remarked upon, if at all, only by specialists. The stylistic incongruities in the composition have become more striking and impose themselves immediately upon modern audiences, for the majority of whom Umbrellas is a work of incomparable charm and appeal.
Renoir may have been encouraged to complete this half finished composition in the autumn of 1885 so that it could be included in the first survey of Impressionism for an American audience, organized by his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel.
The Umbrellas was one of thirty-eight paintings by Renoir in the exhibition, which opened in New York on April 10, 1886. Retitled Rain in Paris it was shown with eleven of Renoir’s most ambitious figure paintings at the American Art Galleries on Madison Square South and East 23rd Street. The critic of The Art Amateur noted that the main gallery was “almost given up to M. Renoir,” whom he considered “a remarkable painter,” even though he spoiled “several of his pictures by tawdry backgrounds and accessories.” A more philistine review appeared in the Brooklyn Eagle a day after the exhibition opened, which ridiculed the event as “the funniest performance to be seen in New York.”

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Someone has said that Renoir created a new mythology out of our poor humanity and endowed it with a sense of happiness. This picture, notable for its naturalness and exuberance, shows Renoir as the gentle, loving chronicler of everyday life. The busy commonplaces of existence capti¬vate him, and under his brush the urba~rr-&cene of his day is transfigured. To the familiar faces, forms, anaa^tivities, he brings a radiance of joy.

It is a showery spring day in Paris, and all the world is outdoors. Perhaps another sprinkling threatens, if one may judge by the half-hidden creature in the center of the picture and by the gallant at the left who is willing to share his umbrella with the girl in the foreground. But if anyone is dismayed by weather, he does not appear in this picture.

A silvery gray-lavender is the major color, and within its narrow range, has an extraordinary variety. Against this is played a dull gold quality, with sharper blues and greens, and golden browns. And black. Always some spot of black, to make the ensemble sing.

Renoir delights in the curves of the umbrellas, and develops them throughout the picture: in the drawing of the girl in the foreground, in her bandbox, in the hoop, the children's bonnets, in the trees in the background.

The lovely midinette in front is surely one of the most winning figures ever painted. Drawn with beautiful simplicity, her lines reverberate in all parts of the composition.

In the right corner, Renoir has given us two doll-like youngsters of such charm as would justify a whole canvas devoted to them alone. They are united, through their color, drawing, and the playful enrichments of their costumes, to the two women in blue. To this portion of the canvas, Renoir has reserved small delights for the eye and his richest color.

Renoir at this time was entering upon his "sour period," and we can see what that term meant: an emphasis on edges, broader areas of color, a modeling like that in relief sculpture but with flattened faces; and distance achieved through line effects (as in the path into this picture). It is only the style that is tighter and drier; the joy of life, the transmutation into beauty of everything he touched - these are only the more in evidence.

This major painting by Renoir bears the sign of years of work and rework. Changing fashions have even been identified in the clothes the people are wearing, and the changeover from a relaxed technique to a tauter modeling is self-evident. Renoir's eye for female beauty, cute children and tender gazes is at work here, and the motifs are additively ranged in the Impressionist manner. Chance movements and the overlapping of figures combine with the statuesque, ancient air of the milliner with the hatbox and with the abstract three-dimensional pattern of the umbrellas that give the canvas its title.

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