Pierre-Auguste Renoir ~ The Skiff (La Yole)1875
Description
http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/cgi-bin/WebObjects.dll/CollectionPublisher.woa/wa/work?workNumber=NG6478
http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/cgi-bin/WebObjects.dll/CollectionPublisher.woa/wa/artistBiography?artistID=598
More from his biography.
The important reason for the change in Renoir’s art at that time was the impact of the masters of the Renaissance whom he studied in Italy. Renoir later said that he had reached the end of impressionism. One of the main objectives of the impressionist style, an accurate analysis of the effects of light and color reflections on objects in the open air, was riddled with paradoxes as Renoir and several observant critics had already recognized. In translating the blue of the river in The Skiff into paint, Renoir has built a picture with claims to objectivity, on his most personal, least communicable sensations of colors and tones. In The Skiff, a superb example of the impressionist idiom taken to its logical conclusion, Renoir’s observations are turned into a painting in which the forms of the object represented seem set to disintegrate.