秋千

Renoir painted this in the summer of 1876, in the garden of a house he'd rented on the hill of Montmartre, and he pulled his friends in to pose. The young woman on the swing is the actress Jeanne Samary. The man with his back to us is the painter Norbert Goeneutte, and Renoir's own brother Edmond is in there too. Look at the dappled light falling across the dresses and the ground. Those loose blue-violet patches of shade were the thing critics couldn't accept when he showed it the next year. One reviewer called the spots on the man's jacket grease stains, another complained the blue was too violent. What we now read as sunlight through leaves, they read as a painting left unfinished. The little girl watching from the side is the one figure who seems to notice she's being looked at.