Two Women with Flowered Hat 1915

Pierre-Auguste Renoir's painting, Two Women with Flowered Hat, employs traditional oil paints on canvas. The visible brushwork is key here, it’s integral to Renoir’s Impressionistic style. The loose dabs of paint create a sense of movement and light, almost as if the scene is shimmering before your eyes. It’s easy to see these techniques as simply aesthetic choices, but they also reflect the rapid pace of industrialization during Renoir’s time. He and his contemporaries captured fleeting moments in an era of rapid social change. These techniques, alongside the composition, and subject matter, also speak to a rising middle class with leisure time. The women in the painting are not engaged in labor; they are relaxing, and enjoying nature, clad in hats bedecked with flowers. Looking closely at the materiality and methods used by artists like Renoir allows us to understand how art is always embedded in social and economic realities.