Louveciennes

In the early 1870s Louveciennes, a village on the hill above the Seine west of Paris, was full of painters. Alfred Sisley lived there from 1871, Camille Pissarro stayed until the spring of 1872, and Renoir's parents had retired to Voisins, a hamlet at its edge, so he was often around. The Barnes Foundation dates this small canvas to about 1872 or 1873 and says it probably shows the village, though there is little in it to prove that. A low shed with a pale roof sits almost buried in a flurry of trees. Beside it stands a person made of hardly more than one stroke of blue with a dab of yellow on top. Renoir kept his closest attention for figures and painted landscapes like this one quickly and loosely, and the browns and yellows running through the leaves are the first signs of autumn.