20/6/23 - Acquisition - Belfast, Ulster Museum - This is an exceptional acquisition, the first Renoir for the Ulster Museum, The Lane in the Wood is also the first French Impressionist painting to enter a public collection in Northern Ireland. Attributed to the Belfast Museum by National Museums Northern Ireland, the painting was acquired through the acceptance in lieu procedure as part of the estate of Sheran Hornby, niece of the British politician Victor Cazalet, from whose collection the work came. As the estimated price of the work exceeded the inheritance tax due by the owner, additional funding supported by the Department for Communities, the Art Fund, the Esmé Mitchell Trust and the Friends of the Ulster Museum was arranged with the assistance of Christie’s Heritage & Taxation Advisory Service.
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- Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)
The Lane in the Wood, between 1874 and 1880
Oil on canvas - 49.5 x 62.8 cm
Belfast, Ulster Museum
Photo: Ulster Museum - See the image in its page
The painting is already on the wall of the Irish museum as part of the corpus of Irish, British and European paintings from before 1900, which has been enjoying a new hanging since February 2022. Renoir takes his place alongside Irish artists such as Roderic O’Conor and John Lavery, who experimented with Impressionist landscapes in the 1880s. They continued their artistic training - begun in Dublin and Glasgow respectively - in Paris, in the studios of Carolus Durand and William Bouguereau, and both frequented the famous community of Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon artists who settled in Grez-sur-Loing, not far from Barbizon, in the last quarter of the 19th century.
Although the precise location of The Lane in the Wood is not known, it was painted between 1874 and 1880, probably in the Fontainebleau area. As the 2007 exhibition of Renoir’s landscapes at the National Gallery in London reminded us (see article), after his naturalistic beginnings, which were strongly influenced by Courbet, the painter quickly found his niche thanks to the emulation he enjoyed with Monet. He set off with Monet to paint en plein air, and his stay at La Grenouillère in 1869 was a milestone. The landscape in the Ulster Museum is characteristic of this new style, an Impressionist landscape par excellence in which Renoir excelled at rendering the quality of light and the texture of the air.
The canvas is one of a small group of landscapes of undergrowth painted by the artist in the first two decades of his career, starting with Jules Lecœur and his Dogs in the Forest of Fontainebleau (1866), now in the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, which is still strongly influenced by the Barbizon school. Almost a decade later, the pictorial language was completely different, with a bright range and fragmented brushstrokes. A pictorial formula emerged for this theme of the undergrowth, as demonstrated by the painting in the Ulster Museum, the one in the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo and the one in the Museum Barberini, Potsdam, acquired from Christie’s London in February 2019. The entire surface of the canvas is given over to lush vegetation through which the sun filters. Long branches against the light are positioned in the upper right foreground, while a narrow winding path creates an effect of depth that no horizon line suggests. The wide variety of brushstrokes and shades of green skilfully convey the multiplicity of plant species without going into detail. Finally, the absence of the human figure in Renoir’s landscapes is rare.