Woman with a Parasol in a Garden

In 1875 Renoir rented a studio in Montmartre with a large, half-wild garden attached, and his friend the writer Georges Rivière remembered how the painter fell for the view of it at once, an abandoned-looking park in the middle of Paris. This picture came straight out of that garden. A woman stands with a parasol against the sun while a man stoops to look closely at a flower, and both figures are small, almost swallowed by the beds around them. Renoir built the shrubs and blossoms from a mass of tiny separate touches of colour, so the whole surface flickers. It is high Impressionism, made the year after the group's first show in 1874, when this loose, bright way of painting was still being mocked in the Paris press. The garden itself has long since vanished under the streets of Montmartre.