Description
There is barely a horizon in this one, just grass rising to fill almost the entire canvas, so that standing in front of it feels less like looking at a meadow and more like standing in one. Renoir lays the green in long, loose, vertical and diagonal strokes, letting darker bottle green, yellow-green, and cool blue-green run together without any hard edges between the blades.
Scattered through that field are small strokes of white and pale yellow, daisies and buttercups suggested rather than drawn, denser at the bottom edge where they are closest to us and thinning out as the grass rises toward a low line of dark blue-green shrubs. A last cluster of white blossoms sits just right of centre, slightly larger and more resolved than the rest, giving the eye somewhere to land before it drifts up into the haze at the top.
The sky, what little shows above the shrub line, is a soft lavender-pink, brushed thin and quick, closer to the colour of dusk than midday, which pulls a faint warmth down into the greens below it. Nothing in the composition insists on a focal point; it is built instead on rhythm, the repeated diagonal strokes of grass moving the eye steadily from bottom to top. A landscape with no figure and almost no incident, just grass filling the frame edge to edge, is more austere than the garden and meadow scenes with people in them that make up most of his outdoor work.
Hung at a distance the picture reads as pure atmosphere, a wash of green and lavender with no hard lines to catch the eye, which makes it work well as a calm anchor in a room. Closer in, the individual strokes separate out, and the eye starts picking out single flowers among the loose green marks.
