This small painting, made in the garden of the Château Brouillard in Montmartre, Paris, with its airy colors applied in a gentle and floating style evokes a spring-like atmosphere. As of 1890, Renoir and his family resided in one of the adjoining buildings, accessible through the large gate across the garden of the house known as the "Château". On April 14, he married Aline Charigot, his former model, and their first son was born in 1885. His second son Jean, who would later make a career as a film director, was born there in 1894. The 1890s also marked the beginning of a new stylistic phase in Renoir's oeuvre, which was to define his work until his death. After a creative crisis caused by doubts in the expressive means of Impressionism, he returned to his creative roots. Having come to Paris with his family as a child, he had initially trained as a porcelain painter at one of the famous Parisian manufactories. His repertoire was dominated by floral pieces and pastoral scenes. The beginning of his important role as a co-founder of Impressionism was marked by his time in Charles Gleyre's studio, where he met Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley and Frederic Bazille. The young painters quickly turned their backs on academia and, with their landscapes and scenes of entertainment venues in and around Paris, laid the foundations for the movement that was nicknamed Impressionism at the first exhibition in 1874 with the participation of Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley. Famous works such as "Dance at the Moulin de la Galette" 1876 (Musée d'Orsay, Paris) or "Breakfast of the Rowers" 1880/81 (Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.) demonstrate, above all, Renoir's commitment to elegant park scenes and casual leisure activities. However, in terms of tradition and self-conception of French art, such scenes are by no means an invention of the 19th century. The models of the Ancien Régime, such as Antoine Watteau with his "fêtes galantes" and Fragonard with his park scenes, are always present in Renoir's pictorial repertoire, not least because of his training as a porcelain painter. With soft, tender strokes and dabbed color accents, he renders his idea of the relaxed park scene in which the young girls have settled down on dainty chairs in a leafy corner of the garden. The carefree self-indulgence on a Sunday in nature, captured in bright, pastel colors, thus emerges as a new defining subject in Renoir's creative phase at that time. [KT]