Paintings I love
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)
Sentier dans le bois
oil on canvas, 65.5 x 54 cm.
Painted in Fontainebleau circa 1874-1877
Private collection
‘I arrange colours, I try out tonal relationships boldly, without being afraid of spoiling a picture … And the experience I gain from these experiments, I apply then to my major paintings… The open air leads you to put on the canvas colours you would never imagine in the subdued light of the studio.’ – Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Intermittently during the first two decades of his career, Renoir turned to the genre of sous-bois painting—the depiction of a forest interior with sun filtering through the leaves overhead—as a means of testing and refining his artistic skills, challenging himself to evoke the ambient atmosphere of a largely enclosed site. In Sentier dans le bois, Renoir succeeded brilliantly in this endeavour, conveying a palpable impression of envelopment in a sun-dappled wood and deftly capturing the mobile effects of light on foliage as the branches overhead sway in a gentle breeze. It is difficult to imagine a painting that more effectively bears witness to one of the central tenets of Impressionism—the plein air master before nature, rapidly transcribing his most immediate sensations, in all their totality.
In this virtuoso painterly display, Renoir covered almost the whole of the canvas with greenery, differentiating among the myriad types of vegetation through exquisitely subtle variations of hue, touch, and density of paint, responding to the freshness and specificity of each detail of the sylvan landscape in turn. The palette encompasses every conceivable shade of green and blue, with silvery-white accents where the sunlight licks at the leaves; short, feathery touches are juxtaposed with longer, more meandering strokes to create a delicate tapestry of pigment that seems to shimmer before our eyes.
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