"Renoir's free brushwork... is an expression of his society's longing for signs of those values that were threatened by the organization of the urban-industrial world: spontaneity, individualism, and the freedom to find consolation among natural things. ...[T]hose values were associated with leisure, with dancing, flowers, a Sunday outing in a park. His paintings of gardens and promenades embody ideals whose social meanings we recognize... the demand that social restraints be lifted to make room for natural instincts, the demand for access to nature, for leisure to cultivate the self—what are these, in another form, but the demands of that era's labor unions and social reformers? ...[S]truggles for more leisure, for more independence from the workplace, and as the unions grew stronger, the activities they organized for their members grew from picnics to suburban outings, and eventually to vacation camps in the country or on the seashore."
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Robert L. Herbert, Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society (1988) p. 193.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Pierre-Auguste_Renoir
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Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (25 February 1841 – 3 December 1919) was a French artist who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style.
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