Femme en rouge dans un paysage

As a young art student, the would-be Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir closely studied the Renaissance and Baroque paintings at the Musée du Louvre in Paris. Renoir observed the luminous color and the sensual, evocative brushwork of Titian and Peter Paul Rubens in particular, and seems to have absorbed their preoccupation with the female nude and the pastoral landscape. The influence of these Old Masters can be felt throughout Renoir's oeuvre, and is evidently on view in Femme en rouge dans un paysage
The present painting depicts a voluptuous nude wandering through a verdant clearing, surrounded by trees. She has long brown hair streaming down her back; her curves are barely concealed by a loose, bright red drape which provides a vivid burst of color in the composition, otherwise dominated by earthy brown and green tones. Unlike his predecessors, however, Renoir provided no clear mythological or narrative pretext for her presence within the woods; much like his modern French contemporaries, such as Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet, Renoir was more interested in cultivating a sense of atmospheric and erotic ambiguity.
Femme en rouge dans un paysage has been dated to circa 1872, two years before the first Impressionist exhibition. It was during this pivotal period that Renoir began to experiment with painting landscapes en plein air, using light, fluffy brushstrokes to capture the flickering appearance of dappled sunlight. This radical new technique, on display in the present work, would soon become a hallmark of his Impressionist pictures.