Today many people think of landscapes as pictures without people, yet most landscape paintings made before Renoir’s time relied on figures to provide context. Renoir was steeped in the history of French painting and was particularly interested in the eighteenth century, when artists such as Jean-Antoine Watteau, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, and François Boucher often depicted the outdoors as a site of aristocratic leisure or as the background to a mythological or historical story. Therefore, it is not surprising to find among Renoir’s landscapes scenes of people relaxing outside. Whether the image features a view of courtship as in The Promenade, at left, or merely a pair on a terrace overlooking the river as in By the Water, also on view in this exhibition, Renoir uses landscape to introduce ideas of nature and its social associations.