Description
The whole canvas is packed with foliage, trunks and undergrowth pressed close together with almost no sky visible at the top edge. A narrow path threads between the trees toward the middle of the picture, where a few daubs of warm red and orange, too small and undefined to read as a specific figure or object, sit in the shaded gap between the trunks. Around that opening, dense clusters of leaves in dark green, olive and near-black are built up in short, choppy strokes, while patches of golden yellow break through where sunlight catches the upper canopy.
Renoir has painted the woods almost as a solid, textured wall rather than a series of individual trees, the brush moving in short dabs and flicks that describe the flicker of light through leaves without ever settling into a single leaf or branch. Cool greens dominate the lower half of the canvas where shadow pools along the ground, while the golden light at the top and in scattered patches through the middle keeps the picture from feeling heavy or closed in. A pale trunk on the left edge and thin vertical trunks further back give the tangle some structure, hinting at depth even where the paint stays dense and flat.
Painted in the mid-1870s, close to the years when Renoir was working alongside other landscape painters on motifs in the countryside outside Paris, this is a picture built on the sensation of standing inside a wood rather than looking at it from a clearing. There is no horizon, no sky to rest on, just an enveloping screen of green and gold that would give a wall real depth and shade, the kind of picture that draws the eye in rather than sitting flat against the plane of the canvas.
