Renoir's Garden
Renoir's Garden was painted by Utrillo from 1909 to 1910. Utrillo's mother, Suzanne Valadon, was Auguste Renoir's favorite model, and abt. 1890 he moved into the stately home shown at right in the painting, Chateau des Brouillards. It was located on the corner of Avenue Junot and Rue Girardon. From the garden, looking north, the suburbs can be seen, while in the east, the famous Sacré-Coeur floats above the skyline.
Commentary by Alfred Werner (1953):
One may recognize the influence of Pissarro and Cezanne, but his solidity of composition, his gift for simplification, and his unerring sense of color relation are instinctive to him. Just as he is not a primitive, neither is he a classicist, a realist, an Impressionist, a Fauve, an Expressionist, nor even a romantic. He is a complete individualist who defies all classifications. It is customary to concentrate on the pictures of his “white period,” when roughly between 1909 and 1914, white tints and shades were prominent in his work. However, the years preceding those of his “white period” yielded many fine paintings; and in the paintings of his later “colorist period” he often used bright and gay hues successfully.
Utrillo is one of the few contemporary painters whose works please sophisticated as well as simple tastes. Despite changing fashions and fluctuations of the market, his canvases bring higher and higher prices with each year—good Utrillos of the “white period” are sold for thousands of dollars.