Os Guarda-chuvas

Look closely and you're really seeing two paintings on one canvas, made about four years apart. Renoir began this crowd of Parisians under a sudden shower around 1881, then set it aside and came back to it near 1885. In between, his ideas about painting had changed, and so had Paris fashion. The little girl with the hoop on the right and the woman beside her keep the soft, feathery Impressionist touch he was known for. But the young woman on the left, carrying her bandbox, is painted in a cooler, firmer, more sculpted way, with clear outlines Renoir had picked up after studying older masters in Italy. Her plain, close-fitting dress belongs to the mid-1880s, while the frillier clothes on the right had been in vogue a few years earlier, so the picture quietly wears the gap in its own hemlines. Scientists at the gallery confirmed the split by the pigments themselves. In the first campaign he used cobalt blue and zinc yellow, and by the second he had switched to ultramarine and Naples yellow. Nobody in the scene has an umbrella up yet except a few at the back, so the whole crowd is caught in that instant of deciding whether the rain has really started.