The Seine at Chatou by Pierre-Auguste Renoir - 1874 - 50.8 x 63.5 cm Dallas Museum of Art The Seine at Chatou by Pierre-Auguste Renoir - 1874 - 50.8 x 63.5 cm Dallas Museum of Art

The Seine at Chatou

oil on canvas • 50.8 x 63.5 cm
  • Pierre-Auguste Renoir - February 25, 1841 - December 3, 1919 Pierre-Auguste Renoir 1874

Although Pierre-Auguste Renoir is often considered a figure painter, the landscapes he painted in the 1860s and 1870s were daringly experimental. In The Seine at Châtou, he fills nearly the entire canvas with water and sky. A narrow band of land forms the horizon line, behind a railway bridge in the middle distance. The intricate, almost nervous brushwork that dominates the painting was characteristic of Renoir's technique in the 1870s, and was also frequently reviled by Impressionism's early critics. Renoir did not exhibit his landscapes at the Salon or in the earliest Impressionist exhibitions. He began to show them publicly only in 1877, at the third Impressionist exhibition, at which he exhibited five landscapes.

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P.S. There is a pretty woman who often appears in Renoir's paintings. Her name is Lise Tréhot. Read here more about the mysterious beauty!