Promenade

In the autumn of 1906 the Salon d'Automne, founded in Paris in 1903, filled rooms of the Grand Palais with a Gauguin retrospective of more than 200 works. Renoir, then 65, appears to have lent this large canvas to the same show through his dealer Durand-Ruel. A nursemaid, Renée Jolivet, walks a small boy through a stand of slender trees at Essoyes, the village in the Aube where Renoir's wife Aline was born and where the family spent its summers. The Barnes Foundation believes the child is probably Claude, Renoir's youngest son, at about four, and dates the picture to around 1905. The nurse wears a pink rose pinned to her blouse, and he clutches a few flowers. One critic wrote at the time that it confirmed Renoir's passage from Impressionism to the great tradition of European painting. Renoir kept it in his studio until he died in 1919, and in 1926 the Philadelphia collector Albert Barnes bought it from the painter's son Pierre.