OIL PAINTING: La Promenade, 1870
What Pierre-August Renoir himself titled this painting is unknown, but La Promenade is in part an homage to earlier artists that 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-Honore Fragonard, whose works he had studied in the Louvre.