Young Girl with a Parasol (Aline Nunes)

Young Girl with a Parasol (Aline Nunes) is an oil painting, produced by Pierre-Auguste Renoir in 1883

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841 - 1919) was a French artist a leading painter in the development of Impressionism. Throughout his career, Renoir produced several thousand paintings.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir's work, Young Girl with a Parasol (Aline Nunes), features a young girl at the centre of the composition. The girl has long red hair, is dressed in 19th-century attire and holds a parasol to her right shoulder.

In her left hand she holds flowers that she appears to have picked herself. A small number of red flowers adorn her hat. The girl is stood in the setting of a garden, park or meadow and in the background there are trees. Renoir creates the impression of a summers day within the work.

In Young Girl with a Parasol (Aline Nunes), Pierre-Auguste Renoir employs a wide tonal range, contrasting the heavily shaded coat, hat, gloves and boots of the girl with her strongly tinted skin, dress and parasol. The blue sky is also tinted and appears in colours and tones almost identical to her parasol. This makes the parasol appear somewhat transparent.

The work features a medium pallet range which features shades of yellow, blue, red and black with a dominance of green. Renoir applied the oil paint thickly and in directional strokes, characteristic of Impressionist art.

In his depiction of the setting, the artist also demonstrates another technique popular throughout the Impressionist movement: 'worrying' over outlines, contours and shading effects, where the application of paint is not limited to the outlines of the details illustrated.

The direct gaze and still, calm demeanour of the subject of Young Girl with a Parasol (Aline Nunes), make the scene depicted appear both candid and staged, as though the girl has been asked to hold a pose. The diversity of the tonal range and pallet create a sense of vibrancy within the work which evokes the energy of a late summers day.

Impressionism was a movement that began in the late 1960s by a group of artists including Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet and Paul Cezanne and is an important movement in the modern period of art history. Impressionism was a separation from the conservative, classical approach to art that dominated the art world throughout the Vanitas tradition.

Art Nouveau followed on from impressionism and gave us one of the finest artists at capturing the female form, both in full length and shoulder length portraits. Alphonse Mucha illustrative artworks included Amants, Bieres de la Meuse, Chocolat Ideal and Four Seasons.

Impressionist artists believed that art should represent specifically contemporary sensibility. The movement and its artists, such as Pierre-Auguste Renior, became very influential and developed into a division within the wider world of European culture.

However, Pierre-Auguste Renoir paints the girl featured in Young Girl with a Parasol (Aline Nunes) using more formal techniques. This represents the artist's break from the Impressionist movement by the mid-1880s, when he began to apply a more disciplined formal technique to portraits and figure paintings, particularly with female subjects.

This change followed a trip to Italy by Pierre-Auguste Renoir in 1881 where he saw Renaissance artworks, such as those by Raphael. These inspired him to endeavour to return to classicism.