Willows and characters in a boat

Around 1880 Renoir was spending his summers on the Seine just west of Paris, at the riverside spots where clerks and shopgirls came out on Sundays to row and picnic under the trees. It was the world he was painting that same season in his large canvas of a boating party, and this smaller river scene comes from the same habit of watching the water. Willows lean over the boat, and the figures in it are barely more than a few warm touches of paint. Renoir worked quickly outdoors in these years, chasing the way sunlight scatters when it falls through leaves and off a moving current. The railway had recently put these banks within a short, cheap ride of the city, and the shaded stretch he set down here was exactly the kind of Sunday place that ride had opened up.