Celebrated for his portraits and nudes, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) is most often associated with figure painting. He was also a lover of nature, however, and an accomplished painter of landscapes.

This exhibition is the first to explore the inventiveness and importance of these landscapes during the first decades of Renoir’s career. Remarkable in their freshness and immediacy, these works of art reveal nature as a deep source of inspiration and demonstrate the artist’s fascination with the effects of outdoor light.

Approximately 60 paintings by Renoir, drawn from public and private collections in the United States and abroad, offer a fresh approach to the French Impressionist’s art. The exhibition begins with works from the 1860s, shortly after the painter met Claude Monet and Alfred Sisley in the studio of Charles Gleyre. It continues into the 1870s, when Renoir’s own landscape style began to emerge, and explores the artist's extensive experimentation with color and composition. The exhibition concludes with paintings from the 1880s, when Renoir’s travels in North Africa and Italy exposed him to new landscape motifs and encouraged his use of an even more intense color palette.

The paintings on view in this exhibition reveal the subtlety of touch; vaporous effects; and lush, full-blown color that mark Renoir as one of the most audacious and original landscape artists of his age.

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