What does Pierre Auguste Renoir's L'Allee Au Bois represent?

Belfast’s Ulster Museum has acquired a rare landscape by the master of impressionist painting Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919).

L’Allee Au Bois, now on display at the Belfast, is an airy sort of vista onto a woodland outside the French capital that makes best use of the impressionistic, light, luminous and spontaneous brushstrokes and painting ‘en plein air’ or outside (in situ) that was so seminal to this artistic movement that predominated in 1870s and 80s Paris, of which Renoir was such an important forefunner.

Born in Limoges, the artist was a celebrator of beauty, especially feminine sensuality, but as he became submerged in the impressionist movement, airy landcapes wherein leaves seem to scatter from the foreground become central as opposed to painting women in a tradition that clearly ran from Rubens to Watteau.

After his family’s move to Paris Renoir became entranced by the artwork he could enjoy daily on display at the Louvre and he ultimately began taking lessons at the Ecole des Beaux Arts.

As is clear from L’Allee Au Bois, which is characteristically impressionistic and deeply concerned with the beauty of the natural landscape, Renoir was inspired by Camille Pissaro and Edouard Manet, who, like him, were early advocates of this uniquely spontaneously style of capturing the near-movement of outdoor scenes, such as in this case the way an area of woodland, flush with vibrant shades of green, is troubled and swept up by the simple movement of a breeze - something that is undoubtedly challenging for an artist to capture on static canvas. It was about pinning motion down; like catching the flutterings of a butterfly.

Hoping to secure a livelihood by attracting portrait commissions, Renoir displayed mostly portraits at his second impressionist exhibition in 1876.

He contributed a more diverse range of paintings the next year when the group presented its third exhibition, including Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette and The Swing.

In the late 1860s, through the practice of painting light and water en plein air, he and friend Claude Monet discovered that the colour of shadows is not brown or black, but the reflected colour of the objects surrounding them, an effect known today as diffuse reflection.