Stock Photo - Pierre-Auguste Renoir: On the Grass (Jeunes femmes assises dans l'herbe), Pierre-Auguste Renoir, c. 1873, Oil in canvas, Two women wearing fashionable dresses relax in the grass; one, it seems, has just picked a bunch of flowers. It is difficult to tell whether the scene takes place in a Parisian garden—perhaps a private, overgrown one—or whether the women are in the countryside somewhere outside the city. What is clear is that Renoir here was painting en plein aire, bringing his canvas outdoors to work directly before his subject. Note how attentive he is to the shifting conditions of the natural world: the dress of the foreground figure is a swirl of colors, with strokes of lavender, blue, and grey indicating shadows from perhaps a tree or a cloud passing overhead. The radical handling of paint—the loose strokes moving in different directions, the jabs of color at upper left—were shocking to critics in the mid-1870s., Overall: 23 1/2 x 28 15/16 in. (59.7 x 73.5 cm)