Description
A whitewashed courtyard house stands under strong, direct sun, its walls a pale blue-gray broken by a red-tiled pergola that shades an arched doorway and two shuttered windows framed in warm rust-red trim. The sun throws hard diagonal shadows across the plaster, carving the flat wall into bright and shadowed planes.
A large dark tree rises behind the roofline, its foliage nearly black in the shade, and beyond it a taller, multi-story building shows a row of pale horseshoe arches and balconies climbing up out of the frame. The layering of low house, tree and tall building behind gives the scene real depth despite the tight, close framing.
Several figures in loose robes move near the doorway and along the garden path in the foreground, painted with quick, generalized strokes rather than individualized faces, white and warm ochre fabric catching the light against the cooler wall behind them. Two children sit together on the sunlit path at the very front of the picture.
Thick green shrubs and low plants crowd the base of the wall on both sides, painted in loose, tangled strokes of dark and yellow-green that contrast with the flat, sunstruck plaster above them. The contrast between hard architectural shadow and soft, scrubby foliage is one of the more striking things about the composition.
The strong sun and saturated warm-and-cool contrast, ochre light against blue-gray shadow, give this picture a punch that reads well from across a room, while the layered architecture and small figures reward closer viewing, a livelier and more populated scene than Renoir’s quieter landscapes from the same years.
