Explore Renoir’s A Gust of Wind

Renoir: A Gust of Wind - Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted A Gust of Wind around 1872, in the early years of Impressionism. The painting, now in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, captures a moment in nature that is both ordinary and magical, a sudden movement of air sweeping across a field. There is no central figure, no fixed narrative, only the energy of wind made visible through paint.

Standing before the painting, the first impression is one of motion. The scene seems to quiver. Brushstrokes flicker across the surface like blades of grass bending in a breeze. Renoir’s hand moves quickly, following the direction of the wind itself. Nothing feels still for long: the grass twists, the clouds shift, and the light scatters through every part of the composition. Yet within that motion, there is coherence. The painting holds together through rhythm rather than a fixed outline.

The surface reveals how freely Renoir worked. Each stroke is confident but never rigid. He used a combination of long, loaded sweeps and short, broken touches, allowing colour to mingle directly on the canvas. Where the paint is thin, the texture of the linen shows through; where it is thick, it catches light, forming small ridges that are visible as you move closer to the surface. You can almost trace the pressure of the brush, the quick lift of the wrist, the sudden change of direction. The energy of those marks is still present, as if the act of painting has never quite finished. It is the viewer who completes the process through engagement, even if only for a brief moment.

Up close, the scene dissolves into abstraction, patches of ochre, blue, and green laid side by side. Step back, and they resolve into the clear sensation of air and movement. This is the language of Impressionism: each mark alone is incomplete, but together they create an optical unity, a living surface of light. Renoir isn’t describing objects so much as the feeling of seeing them, the blur of leaves, and the quick flicker of sunshine on moving grass.

The palette is fresh and direct. Pale yellows and warm greens dominate the foreground, layered with cooler violets and blues that recede into the distance. There are moments of red and pink, used sparingly, to give warmth to the vegetation and life to the air. Nothing in the colour feels mixed or muted; Renoir allows pure tones to sit beside each other so the viewer’s eye does the blending. This optical mixing gives the painting its brilliance. The colours vibrate together, producing a sensation of light that seems to move across the canvas rather than rest upon it.

The brushwork suggests that Renoir used both flat and round brushes, alternating between broad, supple gestures and delicate touches. The paint is often applied wet-into-wet, letting pigments merge softly. In some places, the brush drags slightly, leaving a broken edge that catches light; in others, it glides, depositing a smooth, luminous layer. This variety of mark-making gives the surface its physical presence. You sense not only the scene but the painter’s own movement, his pace, his rhythm, his breathing.

Although A Gust of Wind is a landscape, it feels less like a depiction of a place and more like a record of sensation. Renoir is painting the invisible, the air itself, made visible through its effect on everything it touches. The grasses bow, the sky ripples with passing cloud. The viewer feels the breeze, not through subject matter, but through the character of the marks. The painting becomes a translation of one sense into another: movement turned into colour, sound into texture, and heat into light.

From a distance, the composition balances motion with calm. The sky opens broadly above, its cool tones anchoring the restless surface below.

Renoir often used diagonal rhythms to carry energy through his paintings, and here it creates both dynamism and unity. Despite the apparent spontaneity, the placement of basic forms and colour feels deliberate, created through intuition rather than design.

The surface of the painting has a tactile vitality that is difficult to describe in reproductions. The weave of the canvas remains visible beneath thin passages of paint, grounding the work in material reality. Light reflects differently across these varied textures, absorbed where the paint is matte, glinting where it has been built up thickly. This interplay gives the work its pulse. You can sense Renoir responding to both what he saw and what he felt, adjusting pressure and speed as the wind shifted before him.

Viewed as a whole, the painting demonstrates the Impressionist belief that truth lies not in accuracy but in perception. The forms are less defined than suggested; the subject exists through light and movement rather than contour. Each mark contributes to the whole, and together they create a sense of completeness that no single stroke could achieve. It’s a harmony born of energy, the eye finding coherence within motion.

Even now, more than a century later, A Gust of Wind feels immediate. The colours retain their freshness; the air within the scene still seems to move. It’s as though the painting has captured not a moment in time but the condition of change itself. Renoir’s ability to turn fleeting observation into lasting form reminds us that painting can hold something as temporary as wind without losing its vitality.

I am always moved by the delicate way this painting captures a sensory experience and seems so positive, as if a gust of wind and the beauty it unfolds is the most we can ever hope for or need.

The Habit of Drawing

For details of my forthcoming book, The Habit of Drawing Fast and Slow, please visit www.circlelineartschool.com/the-habit-of-drawing.

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