Gardens & Terraces Collection: Pierre-Auguste Renoir Oil Painting Reproductions

Dappled light, and the scandal of it

When Renoir showed The Swing and the Moulin de la Galette pictures in 1877, the patches of violet shadow on white dresses were the thing critics attacked. The convention was that shadow was brown. Painting it as blue and violet, and letting it fall in disconnected patches, looked like disease to a viewer trained on the Salon.

It is now the most instantly recognisable thing about him, and it is why these garden pictures still feel like sunlight rather than like a description of sunlight.

Gardens as private rooms

The gardens Renoir painted are enclosed places: a wall, an arbour, a terrace with a rail. That enclosure is what makes them work on an interior wall. The picture does not open into distance the way a landscape does; it offers another room, roughly the size of the one you are standing in, with better weather.

Which room this collection suits

Rooms that could use a window they do not have. An interior hallway, a dining room with one small window, a north-facing sitting room. They are also the right choice above a bed, since the mood is calm and there is no eye contact to keep you awake. Because the composition is usually foliage filling the frame, these tolerate being hung slightly higher than a portrait, and eighty to one hundred and ten centimetres is a comfortable size.

Frequently asked questions

What is dappled light?

Sunlight falling through leaves, which breaks it into patches of light and shade. Renoir painted those patches as separate touches of violet, blue and gold rather than smoothing them into an even shadow, and it is the most characteristic thing in his work.

Are there figures in these pictures?

Usually, but not always. Most of the garden pictures include one or more people at ease under the trees; a few are pure garden, with a path or a bed of flowers and no one in them.

Which garden is which?

The best known are the garden in the rue Cortot in Montmartre, where he painted The Swing, and later his own gardens at Fontenay and at Les Collettes in Cagnes. Several others belong to friends and patrons.

Do these work in a dark room?

They are among the best choices for one. The palette is high-key and the subject is sunlight, so a garden picture on a wall in a dim hallway does a good deal of work. Avoid glass if the room has strong artificial light, since reflections will fight the surface.