Monet to Matisse Audio Guide: Self-Guided Audio Tour
Work 2 of 11

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Road at Wargemont, painted 1879. 

Renoir had come to stay at the country estate of his new patron, in Normandy, in northern France, when he stopped to paint the scene in front of him. 

We are close to the English Channel, it’s Summer and, having spent much of his time in Paris painting society portraits, Renoir is now free to wander the coastline, set up his easel in nature and paint without any apparent sketches or outlines.

What makes this painting different to the centuries of art that came before it, is that this blurred and spontaneous depiction is the finished product. 

Renoir was one of the founding members of the French Impressionists, a label given to a group of artists who staged a rebel art exhibition, outside of the Salon.

The Paris Salon was the official art exhibition of the famed Académie des Beaux-Arts, that judged contemporary art and showed it to the public. It was the largest of its kind in Europe and the benchmark for professional artists.  But it was rigidly selective, and its judges had traditional tastes. 

In 1874 Renoir and his fellow artists including Berthe Morisot, Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne and Camille Pissarro staged their own exhibition.

All of their paintings marked a radical shift in art: a deliberate move away from a traditional, academic look to a freer, more loosely painted style where brighter colours implied outdoor light, and air.  

The term ‘Impressionist’ was used to criticise Claude Monet’s work as an unfinished, unprofessional looking sketch.  

The Impressionists were accused of failing to capture the ‘truth’ of their subjects. But we now recognise that artists like Renoir saw themselves as painting a more authentic version of the places and the people right in front of them. 

Road at Wargemont is an atmospheric scene, with a blurred focus.  

The road, beginning from behind those washed dark-green trees on the right, invites us into the interior of the painting.  As well as its enticing composition, notice the contrasts Renoir has chosen, between the dark, purple-y blues and greens and that bright yellow vegetation. A mix of sparsely painted areas and heavier layers. To achieve this, Renoir painted his canvas with a bright white ground (a foundation layer of paint) and this is what makes the colours appear to glow. 

While the canvas was still wet, he painted on it with thinned oil paint, more like a wash than a thick paste, using his oil paints like watercolour. He sets his brush to the surface of the blank canvas and begins to paint in loose, fluid movements. Some spots, like the hillside straight ahead, he rubs away with a cloth to give soft highlights to the landscape.