Description
Two small cottages sit tucked into this green valley, one at the lower left with a pale blue-grey roof and a tall chimney, the other further back and higher up the slope, its roof a soft salmon pink half swallowed by the surrounding bushes. Neither building is drawn in any detail; each is just a handful of geometric strokes, roof, chimney, wall, enough to read as a house and no more.
Between and around them, dense hedges and shrubs fill most of the canvas in short, choppy strokes of green, olive and violet-grey, built up so thickly in places that the brushwork itself becomes the real texture of the picture, almost like woven fabric. Renoir varies the greens constantly, cooler and bluer in the shadowed hollows, warmer and more yellow where the light catches the tops of the bushes.
Behind it all, rounded hills rise in hazy blue and lavender, their forms softened almost to silhouette against a pale, streaky sky. The valley floor between the near hedges and the far hills is left open as a strip of golden-green meadow, giving the eye a place to rest before it climbs back up toward the distance. Quiet rural countryside like this, worked without any figure to anchor it, sits apart from the garden and river scenes full of people that make up most of his landscape work.
In the foreground, a few tall reddish stems and wildflowers push up into the bottom of the frame, painted with quick, thin strokes that stand out against the darker greens behind them. The whole composition builds in layers, flowers, hedges, cottages, hills, sky, each one a slightly cooler and hazier version of the last, giving real depth to what is otherwise a fairly small, densely packed rural view.
