The Gust of Wind

Renoir painted this windswept hillside in 1872, in a France still shaken by the war with Prussia and the bloody collapse of the Paris Commune the year before. He and his friends had barely any money and no name yet; the word Impressionism would not be coined until their first joint show in 1874. So here he simply went out into the countryside of the Île-de-France and tried to paint wind itself, the way it flattens the long grass and drags the clouds across a blue sky. There is almost no subject, just a slope, a few trees bending, and one small house far off on the ridge. A few years later the canvas sold for 55 francs, roughly what a labourer might earn in a couple of weeks.